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Meta announced on Monday that its data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will grow to 5 gigawatts of computing power. The money put into this project will rise to over $50 billion. The new data center, called Hyperion, was expected to provide over 2 gigawatts of computing power. This was to help train big language models, like the ones used in ChatGPT.
The company said on Monday that its Hyperion supercluster in Richland Parish will grow to a 5-gigawatt facility that will cost over $50 billion. This will make it Meta’s largest data center and one of the biggest AI projects worldwide. The site was initially expected to provide over 2 gigawatts of computing power, which is needed to train the large language models used in tools like ChatGPT. When construction started in 2024, it was priced at $10 billion.
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The project’s cost has increased five times in under two years. This is mostly due to wealthy private investors and the state’s choice to give up tax money to secure the deal. In late 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law that says data centers built before 2029 won’t have to pay sales tax for 20 years.
But missing out on tax revenue doesn’t appear to bother Landry. In a Monday statement, he said since the deal was signed, the state has “secured more than $150 billion in new investment by creating an environment where companies can move quickly and build at scale.”
Some business owners agree, saying their workers are making more money because there are more people and resources.
“We’ve been in the charter bus business for 29 years, but nothing compares to what Meta’s project has meant for us,” Scott Holmes, owner of local business Mayo Tours, said in a statement. “We went from 40 coaches to 102, and most of our drivers onsite are now earning over $80,000 a year in a region where the median income is $42,000.”
But not all locals see this behemoth of a data center project as good for the area. Hyperion sits in a parish of about 20,000 people, one of the poorest in Louisiana, and the expansion is reviving hard questions about who ultimately foots the bill for a project of this scale.
The construction has caused more traffic, higher rents, and even attempts to evict people, as many workers come to the area, former Fortune AI writer Sharon Goldman said this spring. Many residents feel the main choices were made before they grasped how big the project was, and now it’s even larger than they thought.
“Meanwhile, there is literally a sign outside welcoming Meta workers while local families are left wondering where they’re supposed to go,” Erika James, a 34-year-old mother of two who grew up in Richland Parish and now lives in a mobile home park in Monroe about 30 minutes away from the Meta site, told Fortune’s Goldman. “We are now having to entertain the idea of leaving the area completely.
“There is nowhere to go if you can’t pay triple prices,” she continued.
Some people in the state who make deals have spoken out more about the trade-offs. Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois told the Times-Picayune that when they first talked about the deal, Meta made it clear they would need incentives to proceed.
“It was ‘If you don’t have this, we will not consider your state,’” Bourgeois said. One lawyer who helped negotiate the deals also said the point of the deal wasn’t to be “nice and welcoming.”
“We’re only giving this to get them here,” Mike Busada, a Shreveport attorney who helped negotiate the deals with Meta, told the Times-Picayune. “We don’t want to give them a dollar more than we have to.”
Meta is not avoiding taxes completely. It doesn’t have to pay state and local sales tax on the equipment in Hyperion, like servers and chillers, which makes up most of its costs. But it still pays a 1% local sales tax on what it buys.
The building cost is very high, so even that 1% helps some locals. A law sends that 1% to bonuses for school staff, with some teachers getting over $50,000, as per Meta. That’s a lot of money, one person said it was “jaw-dropping,” especially since the average teacher pay in Louisiana is $56,785, making them 49th in the country, according to the National Education Association.
