Can AI Save This Failing Rural Economy?

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1:10All right, Riley Griffin, reporter with Bloomberg News here. I am driving up to northeastern Louisiana, a rural part of the state called Richland Parish. This is cotton land, cotton, corn, soybeans. Riley Griffin typically spends her days in Silicon Valley. She's a tech reporter for Bloomberg. But for the past year, she's been following a story that's brought her to a different corner of the country. A place called Richland Parish in the Louisiana Delta. Gas is cheaper than where I live in San Francisco, that's for sure. Richland Parish is made up of a handful of towns and villages. Rayville, Delhi, Mangum, and some unincorporated land.

1:59All told, the parish spans about 550 square miles. It's nearly 12 times the size of San Francisco, but has a population 40 times smaller. I'm driving out here. I'm listening to Tim McGraw. I'm going to live where the green grass grows. I'm Lainey. Wilson. Both of whom are from this area. Richland, like so many agricultural and manufacturing communities around the U.S., has spent decades on the decline. Farmers are struggling to break even. Most kids don't go to college. When they do leave, they often don't come back. Local leaders have been looking for something to revamp the area's economy. An opportunity that would bring new investment to town.

2:49And a few years ago, one came knocking. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been ramping up spending on artificial intelligence. Meta is worth$1.5 trillion and owns some of the biggest social media brands in the world. But the technology landscape has been changing. AI is everywhere. And by many metrics, Meta has fallen behind. This is an AI arms race. Inside the company called OpenAI. Anthropic is building generative AI, a system that can draft content as if a human made it. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, these are known as kind of the frontier of the AI race right now. People don't often mention meta in the same breath.

3:34And that's a problem for the company. Just last month, the company laid off 8 ,000 workers, 10 % of its workforce, as it ramps up spending on AI development and infrastructure. Infrastructure like data centers, which house the chips that power large language models. And Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has plans to build one of the biggest data centers in the world, nearly 4 ,000 acres, the size of about 3 ,000 football fields. He's calling it Hyperion, after the Greek titan. Mark Zuckerberg is a man who loves a reference to the classics. it's a project that will take a lot of investment, a lot of energy and water, and a lot of land.

4:23Enter Richland Parish. You know, you've heard of Silicon Valley, right? We're in Silicon Bayou. Meta's plans for this rural slice of Louisiana have captured the attention of some of the most powerful people in the world. Look at that. That's the size of Manhattan. But as Meta zeroes in on the parish, residents are grappling with what it could mean to become the epicenter of the company's biggest AI push yet. 20 years from now, AI may be as obsolete as bag phones are today. You know, the math eventually becomes hard math at some point. I don't want it to affect detrimentally our water, nor the price of utilities.

5:04We don't fully grasp what's coming.

5:12I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Richland perishes bet on a new kind of crop, data. Could Meta's ambitions bring economic salvation? Or will the community trade one uncertain future for another?

5:34No more unchecked data centers. When a new data center arrives in an area, the community reaction can sometimes sound like this. We're not buying it. We want them to go away. We don't want to hear all of their sugar-coated promises, which we don't believe. It's a really, really bad deal. We don't get anything for it other than we're losing land, we're losing water, and we're losing air quality. There are about 3 ,000 active data centers in the U.S. And as the AI boom demands more and more computing resources, their numbers are growing. According to Pew Research Center, 1 ,500 more data centers are in development right now across the country.

6:14These facilities tend to be polarizing. Politicians, activists, and residents near them have called out data centers for hiking local energy bills, draining water resources, making too much noise. Many data center projects have been delayed, canceled, or scaled back after communities opposed them. So some tech companies hoping to build new data centers have started shifting their strategy. They're looking beyond cities and suburbs and prioritizing areas that may not have the best infrastructure, but do have the right attitude. Companies that are building big are looking to these rural regions, but also regions that are demonstrating a willingness to have them.

6:59Bloomberg tech reporter Riley Griffin again. There's actually a company I've been chatting with called Hamlet that is selling data to hyperscalers about communities. They're doing red, yellow, green. Is this a good place politically to put your data center? What do we know from town hall meetings about how this community will react to a data center? That reaction is important because for companies competing in the AI race, speed is everything. All these data centers, they want to get them up and running as soon as possible. So any delays, be they from politics and PR or actual permitting, is a huge headline risk that they would like to take off the table.

7:45And companies like Meta are putting a lot of resources toward picking places where they can move quickly. Finding a data center site that works for us is like finding a needle in the haystack. Like you have to look for a lot of combinations of the things that are going to work well. Rachel Peterson runs Meta's data center strategy. We started hearing from Mark directly that he wanted to have a very big cluster, the biggest cluster. What Zuckerberg wanted was a huge cluster of GPUs, graphics processing units, the chips that power AI models. And to hold all those GPUs, Meta would need a very large data center.

8:25We were going to put like, you know, a million GPUs in it and we were going to have this big AI cluster up and running. Each GPU on average costs about$30 ,000. So that should tell you something. And putting one million together is a massive amount. Data centers come with some big energy needs. You also need cooling abilities, so water often, to keep that technology from overheating. You need land. You need continuous land in this case, and a lot of it, and preferably cheap land. So Metta set out to find the right site, the needle in the haystack. 2 ,000 miles away from Metta HQ, Richland Parish, Louisiana, was stuck in a rut.

9:10Richland, as you can guess by the name, is known for its rich land. It's soil born from the silt of the Mississippi. When I was a kid, Rival was known as the white gold capital of the South. That's Scott Franklin, a fourth-generation Richland Parish resident and one of the region's largest landowners. That white gold he's talking about is cotton. For generations, cotton plantations built off enslaved labor were the economic engines of the South. Long after emancipation, cotton crops remained the backbone of Richland Parish's economy. But that economy took a turn. There was the 1927 flood, the Great Flood, which really devastated the region, was a huge natural disaster.

9:58It also sent a lot of Black sharecroppers who bore the brunt of that devastation out of the region. There was also the Great Depression. And all the while, the agriculture sector is changing. It's modernizing. But when it does, it doesn't bring about more wealth. It really just consolidates wealth into fewer and fewer hands. You know, the old adage of like, if you drive over a pothole, you notice it. If you drive over a pothole every single day, you begin to forget about it. It's kind of that, you know, if you live here, you don't really quite day to day see the decline. But it's happened, you know, no question.

10:44By the early 2000s, almost 30 percent of Richland Parish's population lived below the poverty line. and local leaders were trying to revitalize the area, diversify its economy away from just agriculture. Around this time, the state of Louisiana bought a roughly 1 ,400-acre plot of land that once belonged to Scott's family, hoping to use it to convince a corporation to settle in the area. Economic development officials wanted a company to plant roots on that land, build a manufacturing facility, and commit to bringing 5 ,000 local jobs. Over the course of two decades, company after company came into town, got the Richland Parish pitch, and then left.

11:28Toyota. Caterpillar. John Deere. Jaguar. Hyundai. One former economic development representative named Tana Trichel told Riley she went the extra mile to try and nab business from Mercedes. I courted them for nine years. I got a new puppy. I named it Mercedes and sent them pictures. But no dice. None of the companies ended up coming to Richland Parish. You go through all that and you get on the mountaintop and you come down. You know, it's a hard fall. And you get this feeling of always the bridesmaid, never the bride. It's not going to happen. That's where Meta came in. In January 2024, Zuckerberg's hunt for a data center site caught the attention of Entergy, a major Louisiana power utility.

12:20Its CEO invited some meta-execs to the company's headquarters in New Orleans to make the case for Louisiana. The CEO stressed that the state's government was pro-business and that Louisiana had ample oil and gas reserves. Energy would not be a problem. He remembers telling meta-executives, use all you want, we'll make more. But Mehta wanted assurances about more than just power. Speaking with folks at Mehta, the willingness of the government to kind of clear the way and be partners to them was also really important. So the state's economic development secretary got to work. Her mandate was clear.

13:03This was Richland Parish's shot. Don't miss out on Mehta. We huddled in a small table and he said, I need to share something with you. We're having very aggressive conversations with a large data center company, and we think we've got a shot at it. But if this is ever going to become real, we all have to start moving heaven and earth. After the break, Louisiana moves heaven and earth.

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14:11So Metta's interest in Richland Parish, Louisiana was piqued. Conversations with a major state energy utility were underway. NDAs were being signed. And locals like Friday Ellis, the mayor of a nearby city, started clocking new faces around town. We walked up and hit them with, y 'all ain't from around here, are you? What Mayor Ellis didn't know was they were actually Metta executives who'd come to scout the area and meet with local lawmakers. Lawmakers who were working hard behind the scenes. It just became this everyone pulling on the rope in the same direction. So it was just this massive Louisiana effort.

14:54That's Susan Bourgeois. She was named Louisiana's new economic development secretary at the same time Meadow was talking to the state's power utility. And her first big job was to make a deal with Meadow. But the clock was ticking. Metta was looking at other states, too. The Metta folks were telling us that they wanted to have their final investment decision by the end of summer. At this point, residents in Richland Parish didn't know this was happening. Not the parish's mayors, not the public. All this deal-making with Metta was going on in secret. And at the state level, lawmakers were already clearing the way to make it happen.

15:34For example, Meta wanted a sales tax break on its GPUs. And again, that is because, let me say it for the people in the back, the GPUs, the chips inside the data center, are the most expensive part of a data center built. In order to get a data center in your state, that is an incentive that must exist. And that's a go, no go. To meet the non-negotiable, the state actually changed Louisiana tax law by working in language about data center tax breaks into an existing rural broadband bill. In politics, that's called hijacking a bill. In June 2024, that bill was signed into law. Meta, or any future tech company trying to build a data center, won't have to pay any sales tax on data center chips or equipment for 20 years.

16:25with an additional 10-year renewal option. The government also agreed to change the state's property laws so Meta could buy that 1 ,400-acre plot of land in Richland Parish without it first going to a public bid. Was there anyone pushing back on this deal? Well, at this stage, remember, this is all happening behind closed doors under NDAs, people who have signed on to really pave the way for the deal. Over those initial deal-making months, there wasn't really public pushback to be had because the public didn't know. And Louisiana leaders had given Metta assurances that once the public found out, they'd be on board.

17:08I remember early on the Metta team asking us, what kind of community pushback are we going to find? Or what kind of, you know, pushback are we going to find in the state? And, you know, from a Richland Parish perspective, we said, none. By late fall of 2024, the pieces of the deal were in place. And in December, Meta went public. For locals in Richland Parish, it was the first time they learned a data center would land in their backyard. Governor Jeff Landry and Meta officials announced a groundbreaking investment of a$10 billion AI data center Wednesday morning in Ravel. This is something given to me by Mark Zuckerberg.

17:49That's President Trump in a cabinet meeting in August 2025. He's holding up a piece of paper with an image printed on it. But look at that. That's the size of Manhattan. So that's superimposed over the island of Manhattan. It takes up a big part of Manhattan. For folks in Louisiana, Trump calling attention to the plan was a big deal. We love having the president talk about it. I mean, you hear it just like President Trump talking about that. I think it made us kind of come back to the realization that this is real. Soon, Meadow was trying to secure billions of dollars of funding from some of the biggest players on Wall Street to pay for the construction.

18:31Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who represents a chunk of Louisiana, started touting a new vision for his home state. You know, you've heard of Silicon Valley, right? We're Silicon Bayou. I said trademark it right now, brother. But that sort of transformation wouldn't come easy. Life as we know it in Ravel is changing. We don't know what it looks like in five years or ten years. We're in this small rural area, and we're trying to figure it out. Right now everybody's just segregated. You're either Team Meta or not Team Meta. After the break, can Meta deliver on its promises to Richland Parish?

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19:49Have you ever been in a small plane? I have not. Okay, so it's a little different experience than being on a jet. Late last year, Riley Griffin got an aerial tour of Richland Parish. She boarded a four-seat propeller plane piloted by a local farmer named Dustin Morris. This morning, we're going to take a little flight in my little Cessna 182, look around Richland Parish, kind of get a bird's eye view and let you see that from there.

20:17You see the cotton from above, just fields of white. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's just this massive dirt pit. And it's five miles long and one mile wide. That dirt pit is Meta's Hyperion construction site. They broke ground in December 2024. And Meta's ambitions for Hyperion have only grown with time. At first, the company said they'd need three natural gas plants to power the project. By March 2026, there were plans to build 10. Once the center is live, its power needs could be enough to fuel the entire city of New York on a winter day. The site itself has also grown. Meta bought even more land, turning its original 1 ,400-acre plot into almost 4 ,000 acres.

21:07For Dustin, it's a lot of change to reckon with. For years, for my whole life actually, I bought into the idea that the land was somewhat sacred and that the land was everything and the production of the commodity, corn, soybeans, rice, cotton, wheat, whatever the commodity is, that was the end goal. And now I finally come around to the idea that the land is still that, But maybe it's not the commodity. Maybe it's selling it for 20 times more than what it's worth in row crop production. Maybe this is the future, and this is how we secure our family's future. And I don't know. But I have come to grips that it doesn't have to have a growing green plant on it.

21:56Already, though, Richland Parish residents are starting to feel the tradeoffs of green crops for concrete. There's a lot more traffic. There's a lot of trucks and a lot of dust. There's a rhythm to farming. And if there's a rhythm to construction, I can't find it. Thousands of construction workers have descended on Richland Parish, working around the clock to build the data center. As many as 7 ,500 are expected overall. In a parish of 20 ,000 residents, that's a significant population bump. And all those workers need to be fed and housed. There are a lot of food trucks. That's one of the big businesses that have boomed and new restaurants and demand camps, the RV parks that have cropped up everywhere in a housing strapped region.

22:44Harry Lewis, the mayor of Rayville, says some people in town have given up their jobs for higher paying ones on the Meta construction site. See, we lost pretty much our whole police department because we pay them$14 and$15 an hour. And they go a mile from Raven and get$20. Nurses are leaving hospitals to do emergency medical work at Hyperion. Meanwhile, local landowners who own property near the site are also trying to cash in. Land that was once going for$2 ,000 has been listed for$50 ,000. But the growth they're responding to could be temporary. Local tax assessors and realtors don't know how to gauge how valuable this rich land actually is.

23:30It's changed my job because it's a lot of unknown, not knowing the value of things. That's a local realtor, Jason Brunix. And that's scary because you don't want to represent people and you not know what the value is. And, you know, and that's what I've told a lot of people that have called me and, hey, what do you think I need to do? What do you think it's worth? Well, to be quite honest with you, I don't know what it's worth. It's a sentiment that's pretty similar to some of the uncertainty around AI itself, which has companies reporting sky-high valuations and investors trying to get in while it's hot.

24:09And where some Richland Parish landowners see opportunity, Lifelong residents Floyd and Sheila McDade see the potential for displacement. We happen to live in a world where everyone can't be property owners. But it doesn't mean that they can't be treated with dignity. The people were kind of struggling from the first, from the beginning. So they were kind of pushed to have to find somewhere else to stay. Floyd and Sheila McDade are a wonderful couple. Folks who have been very civically involved. Floyd was a principal, and they described to me the effects of this data center differently, right?

24:51Floyd came with a note card in his pocket of all the questions that he has. Questions about who's investing in the metadata center, feeling like that hadn't been communicated, curiosity about who will get the jobs, curiosity about the environmental impacts. just questions about the future. You wish that there had been maybe some level of transparency. Information. If Miller has done this before, you knew these interests were going to be there. What I would have liked is some of that information to be disseminated so that people wouldn't feel like they're being bulldozed over. Other residents told Riley they're worried about worsening water quality, and higher energy prices when the data center goes online.

25:44Riley visited the parish after an ice storm this winter that left some residents without power for days. I had a lot of people ask me, when Metta's plant is up and running, and they're seeking the amount of power of New York City on a winter day, if there were a storm of this kind, who would the utility respond first to? The guy down the street with his power out or the data center? Meta told Riley it's been working closely with Entergy to ensure the site's power needs are met and, quote, importantly, so that Entergy's other consumers aren't paying our costs. But some residents have bigger questions about the risks of betting the farm on AI right now.

26:26Meta funded the site's construction using one of the largest private capital deals ever assembled, backed by$27 billion in debt. But Meta only has a 20 % stake in the campus. The private capital firm Blue Owl owns the rest, and the joint venture they've assembled leases the facility to Meta. The company has the chance to back out of that lease every four years. It's left some in Richland Parish wondering, if Meta ever pulls out, or if the AI economy collapses, where does that leave them? They're glass-half-full people. This is a community generally that likes to choose optimism. They're hoping that industry will crop up around the data center, that it won't just be meta, but things that could remain after the construction period.

27:16But a school board member had a more sober take. I don't want people to think that meta will be spending the amount of money that they're going to spend over the next five years in perpetuity. This goose laying the golden egg is not forever. So I hope people don't get greedy. After all, those projected 7 ,500 construction jobs will only last as long as construction does. Meta has committed up to 500 permanent jobs at the site. But that's a lot less than the 5 ,000 local jobs the community had wanted a company to bring. A lot less than 5 ,000 in part because data centers aren't like manufacturing plants.