How Meta Got Everything it Wanted in Secret Data Center Deal

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The secrecy was agreed to by nearly everyone involved, from utility executives to the governor’s office to a local elected official who knew about the talks with Meta and sold 300 acres of his own property for the project.

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Fortunes from the project, however, have been unequally distributed. In Delhi, a poor and majority Black town 10 minutes from the Hyperion site, some residents have seen their rents spike because construction workers need homes.

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Tracy Williams, 41, was evicted from her trailer park last July when her landlord raised the rent to $1,495 from $250 a month. She could not afford to relocate her trailer with only a month’s notice, so she and her family watched as a machine dismantled their home, cut it into pieces and “crushed it like a can,” she said. For the next three weeks, she and her four children slept in their car.

“That was my home for over a decade,” she said. “Not everyone is making Meta money.”

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People still use social media that is not X?

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“Louisiana has an opportunity for something very, very, very big,” the governor told the group, said Ms. Bourgeois and her deputy, Anne Villa. “But leaks kill deals. If this leaks and we lose this deal, if I find out it was you, you’re fired. Are we clear?”

Using NDAs between public officials and private companies is legal but raises transparency concerns, experts said. It has become a common practice among tech companies working on data centers.

Over 50 government officials have signed NDAs with Mr. Landry’s economic development office since his term began in January 2024, according to records obtained by Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations and shared with The Times. The practice was not common in the previous governor’s term.

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“Transparency is a very interesting word,” he said. “Because what we’ve seen is people have used the word transparency to basically kill deals like this.”

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One Republican state senator, Jay Morris, a native of Richland Parish, was particularly eager to see Hyperion happen. He co-wrote a bill that helped the state make the deal with Meta, voted “yes” on the data center tax rebate and spoke in support of the project to a utility commissioner before the state’s power commission voted to approve Entergy’s expansion plans.

Last September, Mr. Morris, who had signed an NDA with Entergy, sold 300 acres he co-owned near the data center site to the energy company, according to property filings.

The money Mr. Morris made was not disclosed in the filings, and he declined to provide a figure in an interview. The value of land near where the data center is being built has skyrocketed to more than $50,000 an acre from $3,000 to $5,000 an acre before the data center was announced, said Sherry Hough, a local real estate appraiser.

Mr. Morris’s sales were earlier reported by Floodlight, an investigative news outlet. Mr. Morris, 68, confirmed the transactions and said there was no conflict of interest.

“We wouldn’t have any data centers at all if it weren’t for those tax incentives,” he said. “I’m probably more popular now in my district than I ever have been.”

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