Meta’s $10 billion Louisiana data center is getting $3.3 billion in tax breaks—more than seven years of the state’s entire police budget
Data centers: The computing infrastructure needed to power the country’s artificial intelligence, where companies spend nearly as much money $700 billion to be built this year alone— is popping up in rural and suburban towns across the country; some of these Manhattan is more than twice the size of Central Park. But the huge footprint of these projects can also lead to an equally large public cost.
At least 36 states now provide tax breaks for companies to build facilities, resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenue. Virginia, the state with the most data centers, distributes $1.9 billion annually to data center developers. According to one study, for Georgia this is $2.6 billion annually. official government estimate. And after proposing a $150 million break in 2024, Texas’ auditor’s office this year increased that figure to more than $1 billion annually; That’s an increase of almost 567% in just one year.
In Louisiana, those numbers pale in comparison to what the state offers a single company. MetaIt will build Hyperion, a massive $10 billion data center currently under construction in Richland Parish, La. The company will receive $3.3 billion in tax breaks, according to a statement. Sherwood News The analysis found there was enough money to fund the state’s entire police budget for more than seven years, the report said.
“These are wasteful subsidies for an industry that is growing very fast and does not need any public investment or support,” said Kasia Tarczynska, senior research analyst at Good Jobs First, a policy resource center focused on government accountability for the use of public subsidies. Tarczynska told Luck The $3.3 billion estimate is a conservative one, and the subsidies are likely larger than anyone could have anticipated.
Elon Musk’s “universal high income” and with thousands of new high-paying skilled trades jobs coming, state governments are racing to attract developers who can make this prediction a reality.
The Louisiana state legislature recently passed a new bill that would allow the Meta stand to receive a large tax break for the facility. ‘Sherwood News’ analysis. Hyperion will be exempt from state and local sales and use taxes for the next 20 years on data center equipment, including GPUs that train and develop AI models. Sherwood News Since the state’s combined state and local sales tax is 9.56%, spending about $35 billion on the center’s GPUs is estimated to give the firm a tax break of about $3.3 billion.
