- Meta will receive $3.3 billion in tax breaks for Louisiana datacenter
- The company will pay zero sales tax on GPU purchases for the site
- The number of natural gas turbine plants needed to power the campus has been tripled
Across the US, AI data centers are being planned and constructed at a scale never before seen, and many states are attracting new investments by offering generous tax breaks.
Meta’s Hyperion campus, set to cost around $10 billion, will grant the company $3.3 billion in tax breaks according to a Sherwood News analysis.
The campus will cover 2,250 acres of Richland Parish, Louisiana, or, as Mark Zuckerberg has boasted, a site that will be “so large that it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
Data centers are the new gentrification
Before the data center was announced, Richland Parish was experiencing a gradual decline in its agricultural industry, with an 11% drop in farms between 2017 and 2022. For a county experiencing an economic downturn, the opportunity for such an investment is too good to pass up.
The Hyperion site was announced in January 2025, and by September of the same year, house prices in Richland Parish had jumped by more than 170%. While residents in the vicinity of the site may now hold properties significantly higher in value than their purchase price, updated tax assessments could force them to sell.
The average weekly wage for a Richland Parish resident in Q3 2025 was just $870, or just over $41,000 per year – far below the US 2025 average of $63,795 and among the lowest average wages in the US. The rapid rise in the cost of housing is likely pricing local residents out of the area, with the data center acting as a new-age surrogate for gentrification. Once completed, the site is expected to contribute just 500 long-term operational jobs.
The Hyperion campus has also required new energy generation sites to be constructed. Entergy Louisiana, the energy supplier in contract to supply Meta’s Hyperion site with electricity, was set to construct three new natural gas turbine plants. However, the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) has since approved a fast-track application to triple the number of plants.
The approved application has since faced numerous petitions from other energy providers, alongside the Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists. The new gas turbine plants will add another 5,200 megawatts of fossil-fuel powered energy generation to the existing 2,262 megawatts already under construction for the Hyperion campus.
Natural gas turbine sites are notorious for the level of noise they generate, with larger sites having a noise profile similar to a commercial airport. There have also been numerous complaints from residents living near to data centers who have been experiencing nausea, dizziness, and other symptoms associated with the hidden effects of infrasound.
Via Fortune
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
