Meta to get more than $3 billion in tax breaks for its 2,250-acre data center in Louisiana – enough to fund the state’s police budget for seven years

• Meta to get $3.3 billion in tax breaks for its Louisiana data center
• The company will not pay any sales tax on GPU purchases for the site
• The number of natural gas turbine plants needed to power the campus has been tripled

In the United States, AI data centers are being planned and built on a scale never before seen, and many states are attracting new investment by offering generous tax breaks.

Meta’s Hyperion campus, estimated to cost around $10 billion, will give the company $3.3 billion in tax breaks according to a report. Sherwood News analysis.

The campus will cover 2,250 acres of Richland Parish, Louisiana, or, as Mark Zuckerberg boasted, a site that will be “so big it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan.”

Data centers are the new gentrification

Prior to the data center announcement, Richland Parish was experiencing a gradual decline in its agricultural sector, with an 11% decline in the number of farms between 2017 and 2022. For a county facing 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 that year, real estate prices in Richland Parish had jumped more than 170 percent. While residents near the site may now own properties worth significantly more than their purchase price, updated tax assessments could force them to sell.

The average weekly wage for a Richland Parish resident in the third quarter of 2025 was just $870, or just over $41,000 per year – well below the U.S. average of $63,795 in 2025 and among the lowest average wages in the United States. Rapidly rising housing costs risk pushing local residents out of the area, with the data center acting as a new-age substitute for gentrification. Once completed, the site is expected to create only 500 long-term operational jobs.

The Hyperion campus also required the construction of new energy production sites. Entergy Louisiana, the energy provider contracted to supply electricity to Meta’s Hyperion site, was to build three new natural gas turbine plants. However, the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) has since approved an expedited request to triple the number of plants.

The approved application has since been the subject of 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 an additional 5,200 megawatts of fossil fuel power generation to the existing 2,262 megawatts already under construction for the Hyperion campus.

Natural gas turbine sites are known for the level of noise they generate, with larger sites having a sound profile similar to that of a commercial airport. There were also numerous complaints from residents living near data centers who experienced nausea, dizziness, and other symptoms associated with the hidden effects of infrasound.

Via Fortune

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Benedict is a senior security editor at TechRadar Pro, where he specializes in covering the intersection of geopolitics, cyber warfare and enterprise security.

Benedict provides in-depth analysis of state-sponsored threat actors, APT groups, and critical national infrastructure protection, his reports bridging the gap between technical threat intelligence and B2B security strategy.

Benedict holds a Masters (Distinction) in Security, Intelligence and Diplomacy from the University of Buckingham Center for Security and Intelligence Studies (BUCSIS), his specialization providing him with a strong academic framework for deconstructing complex international conflicts and intelligence operations, as well as the ability to translate complex security data into actionable insights.