It's a new world in northeast Louisiana with Meta plopping down in rural Richland Parish what now may become the world’s largest data center, pumping in $50 billion in economic activity over the next decade, it was announced recently. I experienced a symptom of that with this traffic jam at rush hour with vehicles returning from the construction site over a road that never used to see anything close to that volume.
Anecdotal evidence like this now has empirical confirmation. The economic development group Grow NELA has inaugurated a web site displaying data it collected on general sales taxation across the 10-parish region. In some cases, the numbers are astonishing.
Every parish showed sales tax growth from when Meta first announced the Hyperion project at the end of 2024. Only a couple have a pre-Meta quarter that was higher than any of the quarters in their Meta era. Ouachita from the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of this year was up 17 percent, compared to only 14 percent from the first of 2021 to the same in 2024. For all of 2026, sales tax growth in on track to increase 19 percent.
The most stunning numbers come from Richland. For the first quarter of 2026 it collected $38.7 million in sales taxes, over 2.5 times the amount collected in that quarter last year and over three times the amount collected two years ago in that quarter. It only collected $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2021. Sales taxes going to the Richland Parish School District exploded upwards 734 percent first quarter over first quarter, leading it to distribute bonuses for four-year-or-more certified teachers of $50,000. Even non-teachers on the job just a year received over $4,000.
Hotel tax revenue numbers also show the tremendous impact the project is having on the headquarters area for Hyperion professional services, Ouachita. These are up 68 percent first quarter over first quarter.
Best of all, the scale of the project is so huge that the benefits will continue for many years to come. Normally, the construction jobs last only a couple of years and the permanent full-time jobs may number only in the dozens. Yet this is so huge that construction work will continue for a decade and leave a thousand high-paying jobs.
The extended period of near-guaranteed boom increases the latitude for local governments to decide wisely what to do with their new-found revenues and how to leverage them so that when construction is complete the bounty continues, but in other forms. Tax and regulatory policy can’t be such that it dampens enthusiasm for spinoff businesses which add more revenue. Spending can’t be all outdoors for new programs with ongoing commitments or Santa Claus capital outlay, but instead focuses on infrastructure to support the new economic growth and/or socked away in savings to generate a future revenue stream or rainy-day fund.
What has happened in northeast Louisiana is generational and transformational, if government doesn’t get in the way. Let’s hope policy-makers have the good sense to understand that.
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