A certified teacher in Richland Parish, Louisiana, can collect a supplemental check of up to $50,935 this year. Last year the maximum was $10,200. She still teaches the same children in the same building, in a corner of the Delta where soybean fields run to the horizon, and young people have been leaving for work elsewhere. The money came from sales taxes. The sales taxes came from construction of a Meta data center a few miles down the road.
That check is already drawn, which is why it sat on the table at the All-In Summit. Meta President Dina Powell McCormick appeared there with Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois and Sheldon Jones of the Richland Parish schools. In December 2024, Meta committed $10 billion to the site. On July 13, 2026, Louisiana announced that the commitment now exceeds $50 billion, for a campus of nearly 10 million square feet and 5 gigawatts of computing capacity. Governor Jeff Landry said projects like it “ensure America continues to lead in the technologies that will define the next generation.” The panel’s narrower claim matters in Rayville. The leading can be done in a Delta parish, and the people who live there can be paid for it, provided the state writes the terms before the first crane arrives.
The bonus is the part that has already happened. The New York Post reported that the parish collected $42.9 million in sales and use taxes in the first nine months of its fiscal year, and that Meta made a separate $22.4 million tax payment in May. The school board’s explanation matches what a shopkeeper in Rayville already sees. Thousands of construction workers buy lunch, fuel, lumber, and lodging. Several of the parish’s existing taxes fund employee pay, including a 1% parish-wide sales and use tax authorized on February 6, 1968, and dedicated to school salaries and retiree benefits. Panelists put local tax growth at 60% to 70% early on and 260% more recently. Nobody who lived there before was handed a new levy. The larger base ran through an ordinance that had been sitting on the books for half a century.
You might ask whether one fat year is a policy. Jones told the audience that teachers from outside the parish have started asking about openings, which is what happens when a poor rural district can suddenly outbid its neighbors. He added that, for the first time in his 30-year career, every teacher the district interviewed this year was fully certified. The Wall Street Journal, relaying local officials, described “an influx of economic activity that is helping to revitalize a slumping region.” Test scores are a question for later years. Recruitment is the question the district can answer now.
Louisiana projects 7,500 workers on site at peak construction, and roughly 1,000 permanent operating positions, and the state’s economic development agency models another 1,900 indirect jobs on top of those. In a parish of about 20,000 people, a thousand steady paychecks change who can remain. Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which has studied the most mature data center market in the country, concluded in December 2024 that distressed rural communities can compete for AI training facilities in particular, because training needs land and power more than it needs a city nearby. Jones wants leaving Richland Parish to be a choice graduates make. For decades, the local economy made it a necessity.
A mill town’s payroll was never the whole of its importance, since suppliers, contractors, and lunch counters all rode the same wave and the county taxed the traffic. Meta has awarded more than $1.6 billion in contracts to Louisiana businesses since construction began. On the panel, that figure had faces: a caterer who went from 40 meals to 400, and an entrepreneur who opened a business because Meta was coming. Virginia’s auditors found the same pattern at scale, with much of the construction spending staying in state and data center taxes reaching 31% of total local revenue in one mature market.
That same year, the campus scaled up, and the supply chain began to follow. In June, Faith Technologies announced an $80.5 million plant in neighboring Ouachita Parish, with 500,000 square feet devoted to electrical assemblies and energy systems, at least 200 direct jobs, and entry-level pay starting at $22 an hour. No one claims Meta alone summoned that plant. A region already building power and computing infrastructure becomes a place where it pays to manufacture parts nearby.
Critics say neighbors will pay for all this on their electric bills. A 5-gigawatt customer would do that if the utility were allowed to push the new costs onto a widow on a fixed income. Entergy Louisiana describes the Meta agreement as the opposite arrangement. Meta pays its full cost of service and funds the generation, transmission, and related upgrades required to serve the campus. Entergy projected $650 million in customer savings over 15 years under the original deal, including roughly 10% cuts in storm charges on customer bills, and in March it projected another $2 billion over 20 years, for $2.65 billion in combined benefits. These are forecasts. Regulators should hold the utility to them rather than treat the press release as a result. President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge would carry the model nationwide. Developers bring new supply, pay for delivery infrastructure, and pay for contracted power even when they do not use it.
Water travels faster on a Facebook thread than power does. The Richland design circulates a glycol mixture through the computing halls in a closed loop and sheds heat through dry cooling for most of the year. Bourgeois told the panel the campus will use less water than the farming operation it replaced, which matters because the site displaced irrigated farmland. Microsoft has published a design that eliminates evaporative cooling entirely and saves more than 125 million liters per facility each year, with the first sites due in late 2027.
Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the construction industry must attract 349,000 new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027, and it singles out electricians capable of the precision wiring that data centers demand. The panel cited 500,000 open positions and welders earning $120,000 a year. Wages like that mean little to a man who cannot afford a month without a paycheck while he trains. Meta’s America’s Workforce Academy, launched with $115 million, targets him. It covers tuition, travel, and lodging; pays a daily stipend; runs for four weeks for its construction and fiber technician tracks; and promises graduates a job. According to the panel, 40,000 people have applied, 250 have graduated, and retention stands at 90%. The course is four weeks. Graduates walk out with a start date and an industry credential, then learn the rest of the trade on a live site.
The politics are messier than the usual allignments would predict. ABC, the voice of merit shop contractors, is a partner in the Academy. North America’s Building Trades Unions signed their own partnership with Meta in August, including a community fund for teachers, first responders, and local infrastructure. Organizations that spend most years at odds agreed there is a generation of work on the calendar. A governor who wants to build can find allies in both halls if he asks.
Skeptics press a harder point. The companies get tax breaks, the cranes leave, and the town is left with a windowless box and a handful of technicians. The reply lies in what a state can demand before the first crane arrives. Sites with land, reliable power, and a permitting office that finishes a file are scarce, and that scarcity is the parish’s bargaining position. Governor Landry’s Executive Order 26-058 makes participation in the state’s data center incentives conditional on paying for incremental electric infrastructure, long-term reliability, workforce development, local tax contributions, resource stewardship, and accountability. A reduced rate on a tax base that would otherwise not exist is still new revenue. Virginia’s audit shows recurring equipment and property taxes outlasting construction. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has warned that local moratoriums and five-year interconnection queues are already slowing the buildout and pushing projects toward states that can finish a permit. The panel acknowledged a survey in which 80% of respondents viewed data centers unfavorably. That survey does not vote in Richland Parish. The parish that wants the project, on terms it can read and enforce, gets to say yes and keep the proceeds.
The stakes run past Louisiana. David Sacks put the matter plainly when the White House released its AI Action Plan: “To remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race.” That race is physical. Models are trained in buildings; the buildings need power, fiber, and electricians, and a country that cannot permit the buildings will watch them rise somewhere else. On June 10, Senator Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged Chinese influence on campaigns against American data center development. The investigation will show what it shows. Beijing’s interest in a slower American buildout does not depend on the outcome of that file. The same campuses already feed tools most zoning hearings never price, including Meta AI glasses that the Blinded Veterans Association now offers, with training, to eligible blind and low-vision veterans who use them to read mail and identify objects on a kitchen counter.
Earlier waves of technology wealth pooled in a few zip codes, and the rest of the country was told to be glad for the apps. This wave happens to need things Richland Parish has: acreage, transmission lines, a willing statehouse, people who can pull wire. Over the next decade we will know whether graduates stay, whether operating revenue replaces the construction surge, and whether Entergy’s projections show up on actual bills. Louisiana has written its terms down. Other states can copy them or improve on them. The ones that refuse to build will still use the AI; they will just send the taxes to somebody else’s school board and then wonder why they cannot keep a teacher.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.