Meta’s Data Center Will Be the Biggest in the U.S., but No One Knows Who They’re Hiring

Across a rural pocket of cotton and soybean fields in northeast Louisiana, Meta, the eighth most profitable company in the world, is attempting to build America’s largest data center. 

The project, which is located in Richland Parish, an area home to three times as many residents as the national average, has seen its anticipated investments reach $250 billion. 

But earlier this month, Louisiana regulators decided the public doesn’t get to know two of the most basic things about it: how many jobs it will actually create, or how much electricity it will actually use.

The decision came during a Louisiana Public Service Commission hearing where Republicans voted to throw out a judge’s recommendation that the tech giant, which raked in over $70 billion in profits last year, should provide the information. The lone dissent came from Davante Lewis, the commission’s only Black member and its only Democrat, who represents a stretch of industrial river communities so scarred by petrochemical pollution that residents call it “Cancer Alley.”

Lewis said he believes that other elected officials in the state are not operating with their constituents in mind.

“The commission … believes the community is high-paying executives, the governor, the business council and business alliance, and all the rich people,” Lewis told Capital B. “They didn’t care about the actual poor, Black, and brown, working-class people.”

Jean-Paul Coussan, another commissioner, said sharing the job and electricity data “would send a chilling effect to businesses across America trying to do business in Louisiana.”

Meta’s insistence that its job and energy figures remain “confidential and proprietary” fits a now-standard playbook. Tech companies routinely require states and utilities to sign non-disclosure agreements before negotiating data center deals, cloaking basic public-interest questions — job counts, water and power draw, and tax costs — under corporate secrecy clauses long before public voting occurs. 

Louisiana has leaned into that opacity more than most, joining roughly 25 states that don’t disclose which companies receive data-center incentives or their value. It is a practice watchdogs say leaves ratepayers and residents in Black, low-income parishes like Richland Parish in the dark as hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in the industry. 

As tech companies pour hundreds of billions into the AI data center boom, research shows these facilities are landing overwhelmingly in Black and low-income communities already treated as environmental sacrifice zones, from Bessemer, Alabama, to Memphis, Tennessee. 

“We’re really in a different gilded age here, where the haves basically are the voice of everybody, and the have-nots have to sit there and suck up … instead of being engaged with the community,” Lewis said. 

The release of jobs data is of concern to local advocates who are fearful that jobs aren’t flowing to the local Black, impoverished communities.

“I think it’s a witch hunt coming from politically motivated parties, a point underscored by all the avowed democratic socialists testifying today in favor” of releasing the information, Coussan said.

Data center NDAs keep Black communities in the dark 

Big Tech, racial justice advocates argue, is following the map Big Oil drew decades ago, banking on towns with large Black populations and little political capital.

Nationally, nearly half of the roughly 700 data centers reviewed by researchers sit in communities with above-average pollution and these communities are “overwhelmingly” non-white.

And more than 200 new gas plants tied to the AI buildout are disproportionately rising near Black neighborhoods, worsening asthma and cancer risk in communities that had little say in the decision.

Public frustration was evident at the meeting.

“If this project will bring such huge benefits to Louisianians, what is there to hide?” Jessica, a Baton Rouge resident said at the hearing. 

The move, praised by Republican officials across the state, is the most recent of a long line of incentives offered to Meta, including approving the new power plants and offering major tax breaks. Already, the state has approved plans to build seven new fossil fuel power plants, totaling $11 billion, to support the data center’s massive expansion. 

Critics, including Lewis, counter that without that information, the public — particularly in a low-income, majority-Black region already burdened by industrial pollution — has no way to verify the deal it’s been sold.

“We are building infrastructure solely for Meta. And if we don’t understand how Meta derived to their number, how can we be sure that there’s not a risk on us? What if Meta miscalculated and they really only need five gas power plants instead of seven?” Lewis said. 

If Meta overestimated its needs, the state may be building infrastructure and locking in costs for capacity it doesn’t need.

Neither Meta nor Entergy, the local utility company, offered testimony defending the projections during the exchange. Both companies did not respond to Capital B’s request for comment.

Lewis sat through the entire hearing alone. His three Republican colleagues did not attend the trial, he said, and when the case came back to the full commission for a final vote, none of them offered a legal reason for tossing out the judge’s ruling.

Republican commissioners argued that information on construction jobs is readily available to the public, but the permanent, in-state positions were not important to share. 

However, the original reasoning behind releasing the permanent jobs estimate, a judge ruled, traced back to the commission’s own “lightning initiative,” a rule change he opposed that fast-tracks data center approvals in as little as eight months by justifying them primarily as economic development and job creation. If job creation is the basis for calling a project in the public interest, the judge reasoned, regulators must be able to verify the economic value of those jobs.

“If we are going to look the Louisiana people in the eye and say this is a good economic deal, then we should be able to say how many jobs they are going to create,” Lewis said. 

What Louisiana signals to the rest of the country

Meta says the data center will eventually support 500 to 1,000 permanent jobs, for which the state has handed the company roughly $3.3 billion in sales-tax exemptions over 20 years. But now the exact number will be hidden. 

Meanwhile, in towns near existing data centers, residents have watched electricity bills climb by as much as 267% as facilities gobble up new grid capacity, and some report taps running brown as water tables strain under the industry’s demands.

Louisiana has for decades built refineries, chemical plants, and gas-fired power stations in the places least equipped to fight back, and residents of the original Cancer Alley already carry cancer risks up to 50 times the national average from decades of unchecked emissions. 

The data center is powered by the same playbook, advocates argue. Already, utility ratepayers in the state have backed more than $5 billion in investments for Meta and longtime Black residents have been pushed from the community. 

“They don’t get to bypass the people. Economic development is not a blank check here in Louisiana,” Lindsay Garcia, a U.S. congressional candidate said at the hearing. “A job is not a bribe for silence, and investment is not a substitute for accountability. Prosperity does not require secrecy.”

Read More: 

• Data Centers: The Toll on Black Communities

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