Venture Global plans an off-grid AI power network in south Louisiana.

Venture Global, a liquefied natural gas exporter, has announced plans to build a 10-gigawatt off-grid power network to supply artificial intelligence data centers. The facilities would sit on land the company owns near its terminals in Plaquemines and Cameron parishes.

The company said Thursday that it has signed agreements with GE Vernova and Baker Hughes to buy 16 natural gas turbines for the private network. The turbines can produce up to 11.5 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power about 8.5 million homes, or nearly 10 times the peak summer demand of New Orleans.

Operating entirely "behind-the-meter" in "Island Mode," the network would rely on Venture Global's own natural gas supplies to generate power. A closed-loop water system would cool the data centers. According to the company, the data centers will place no demand or extra costs on local public utilities.

A private network lets companies bypass the typical five- to seven-year wait for an interconnection to the Louisiana grid, and an even longer wait in many other states.

Venture Global CEO Mike Sabel noted that the company's existing 4.5-gigawatt private grid is already one of the largest of its kind in the world. "Over the last decade," Sabel said, "Venture Global has successfully built complex energy infrastructure, including one of the world's largest private industrial electric grids that supports our core LNG export business."

The company's Plaquemines facility sits on 630 acres along the Mississippi River, and its Cameron Parish export plant occupies a 1,582-acre tract along the Calcasieu Ship Channel, providing space to site data centers. Sabel said the turbine purchases will allow Venture Global to expand "power capacity available for new compute as and when we elect."

"By providing Island-Mode power generation, gas supply, closed-loop water systems, thousands of acres of land, data centers, and other necessary infrastructure, Venture Global is creating a vertically integrated AI utility that could solve for the many chokepoints associated with the AI buildout," Sabel said.

Venture Global expects to place the first purchase order for a power island by the end of 2026. Deliveries for all 16 turbines are anticipated by the end of 2034.

In a related development, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a final order Thursday allowing full commercial operations to begin for the first phase of the Plaquemines facility. The plant's capacity is now 13.3 million tons per year. Once all phases are fully commissioned, the facility could produce up to 58 million tons of LNG annually.

Total LNG exports at the company's Plaquemines and Calcasieu facilities are expected to grow from 39.6 million tons per year to more than 100 million tons per year after all planned expansions are completed, which the company anticipates in 2031.

Venture Global's planned private network is rivaled in scale by the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Piketon, Ohio. The $33.3 billion, 10-gigawatt project was previously recognized as the largest data center development cluster under development globally. The Ohio mega-campus is expected to provide up to 9.2 gigawatts of co-located gas-fired power generation. It is a public-private partnership built on remediated federal land and will interconnect with public utility grids to reach its full 10-gigawatt operational capacity.

In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Venture Global estimated it will invest approximately $17.2 billion in the off-grid AI network in Louisiana.

In early 2024, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality finalized a $245,000 civil penalty in a settlement with Venture Global Calcasieu Pass LLC and TransCameron Pipeline LLC over nearly 200 air permit violations. State regulators cited the company for unauthorized releases of hazardous air pollutants, including benzene and formaldehyde, between 2022 and 2024.