EVANS CUTCHMORE
LOUISIANA POLITICS | COMMENTARY
When the Deal Gets Done Before You Know It Exists: Holly Ridge, Hyperion, and Who Pays the Price
Part Two of an ongoing series on data centers, governance gaps, and Louisiana communities left out of decisions that change their lives.
By Kim M. Braud | Evans Cutchmore
Published March 15, 2026 | New Orleans
I. A Town That Didn't Get to Vote
Holly Ridge, Louisiana is not the kind of place that makes national news.
It's an unincorporated community of fewer than 2,000 people in Richland Parish, a rural stretch of northeast Louisiana known for flat farmland, cotton fields, and cane brakes. It has a Baptist church directly across from what used to be an empty lot. It has a small elementary school with a playground that kids aren't allowed to use anymore. It has families who've lived on those roads for generations, who know their neighbors by name, who wave at the same cars every morning on the way to work.
In December 2024, Meta broke ground in Holly Ridge on a data center it calls Hyperion. At $27 billion and 4 million square feet, it is projected to become the largest data center in the world. President Trump has held up visuals of it at Cabinet meetings. Mark Zuckerberg has compared its eventual footprint to the size of Manhattan. Analysts call it a landmark moment for Louisiana economic development.
The 2,000 people who live next door were not consulted.
II. The Playbook
Before I talk about what's happening to the people of Holly Ridge, I want to name the mechanism, because understanding it is the whole point.
This is how the deal got done.
In January 2024, Meta executives met privately with Entergy Louisiana, the state's dominant utility, to scope out a site for what would become the world's largest data center. What followed was, by Louisiana officials' own description, a frantic race to secure the most favorable possible terms before Meta could take its billions somewhere else.
Louisiana's governor, house speaker, economic development secretary, and revenue secretary all collaborated behind closed doors, bound by nondisclosure agreements they signed before talks began. During the 2024 legislative session, leadership quietly rewrote an existing broadband bill, one a Republican lawmaker had sponsored for an entirely different purpose, slipping in a massive tax exemption for Meta without most of the legislature realizing what had happened. The project was given the code name "Project Sucre." The French word for sugar. A callback to Louisiana's plantation economy, chosen by the people engineering a deal that the public wouldn't know about until it was done.
When residents learned of the project, they learned of it the way most Louisiana communities learn of decisions that reshape their lives: from complaints and media coverage, after the fact.
"The secrecy has gotten out of hand," Rev. Harry Joseph Sr., an Ascension Parish pastor who has watched similar deals unfold in his community, told state regulators at a December 2025 hearing. "Enough is enough."
He is right. And I would add: this is not accidental. Secrecy is not a bug in this process. It is a feature.
III. What Happened Next
Once the deal was done, construction began. And the people of Holly Ridge got their preview of what it means to live next to the world's largest data center.
Their water turned rust-colored. Their power started shutting off without warning, sometimes for days. The roads surrounding the Hyperion site, once quiet rural routes, became staging grounds for thousands of heavy construction trucks daily, a traffic surge that produced a 600 percent increase in crashes. The playground at Holly Ridge Elementary was closed because three crashes near the school's front lawn prompted safety concerns. A local fourth grader told reporters that she and her grandmother "almost got killed" by an 18-wheel semi. A speed limit sign in front of one resident's home was bent sideways after being struck by a passing vehicle. The trucks kept coming.
Joseph Williams and his wife Robin live directly across the street from the construction site. They told the Gulf States Newsroom they've never been contacted by Meta, not after filing complaints, not after the power outages, not after the water changed color. "Nobody hadn't come talk to me about nothing," said Dorothy Lively, who lives at one of the site's main entrances.
Meta, for its part, issued a statement saying it strives to be "good neighbors." None of the roughly dozen residents interviewed by the Gulf States Newsroom had ever heard from the company directly.
IV. The Environmental Math Nobody Is Doing Publicly
I want to slow down here, because what's coming is more consequential than the construction disruptions, as serious as those are.
Hyperion will require more than 2,000 megawatts of electricity to operate. By some estimates, that represents close to 20 percent of Louisiana's total energy consumption. To meet that demand, Entergy is building three new natural gas-fired power plants at a cost of $3.2 billion.
Those plants will run on fossil fuels. They will emit carbon. They will be built in and around a parish of fewer than 20,000 people, a parish that is more than 36 percent Black, that has a median property value less than half the national average, and that has almost no political leverage relative to the corporations and state officials who made this decision.
Here's the part that should concern every Louisiana ratepayer: those gas plants are being built with a 30-to-40-year lifespan. Meta's current financing structure, which involves a joint venture with private equity firm Blue Owl Capital, contains provisions that would allow Meta to walk away from the project within four years. Environmental groups including Earthjustice, representing the Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have raised the alarm: if Meta leaves, Louisiana utility customers could be left paying for decades of gas plant infrastructure that was built to serve a corporation that is no longer there.
The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted to dismiss a request to investigate this risk. Louisiana regulators have, so far, sided consistently with the deal.
There is no air quality monitoring station in Richland Parish. The nearest LDEQ monitoring site is in Monroe, 30 miles away. That means there is currently no independent baseline measurement of what the people of Holly Ridge are breathing, before, during, or after the construction of the world's largest data center in their backyard.
The Gulf States Newsroom has launched a community environmental monitoring project. They are testing the air, water, and dust themselves, because the state has not done it.
Read that again.
V. The Pattern Is Not Subtle
I grew up in New Orleans. I came back to this city after more than 20 years away because I believe in what Louisiana is and what it can become. I write about civic infrastructure because I believe that who gets notified, who gets consulted, and who gets protected are not administrative details, they are the whole question.
What happened in Holly Ridge follows the same pattern I documented in New Orleans East. A consequential decision is made behind closed doors. Legal notice is given in ways that function as theater. The community most affected, often a community that is Black, rural, low-income, or some combination of all three, learns about the decision when trucks are already rolling. The governance gap is not corrected. It is repeated.
In New Orleans, the gap was a 16-month silence between a zoning approval and the council representative finding out. In Holly Ridge, the gap was an entire year of secret negotiations, NDA-bound officials, and rewritten legislation, followed by groundbreaking.
The mechanism is the same: decisions are made by people who will not bear their consequences, for communities that were never given the opportunity to participate.
"I'm tired of hearing 'jobs, jobs, jobs,'" Rev. Joseph told state officials at the December hearing. "We don't get these jobs. They're not for us."
He's describing a pattern that runs through Louisiana history like a thread. Sugar. Cotton. Petrochemicals. Cancer Alley. And now, AI infrastructure. Each boom promised transformation. Each one extracted more than it left behind, and concentrated what it did leave among people who were already well-positioned to receive it.
VI. What Accountability Looks Like From Here
I am not arguing that economic development is bad. I am not arguing that data centers shouldn't be built. I am arguing that the people who live where these projects land deserve to be in the room before the deal is done, not after the trucks start coming.
Here's what accountability could look like, and what communities and advocates should be demanding:
Transparency requirements before, not after. No NDAs for public officials on projects that will fundamentally alter the infrastructure of a community. If a deal requires elected officials to hide it from their constituents, that is disqualifying.
Environmental baselines before construction. The nearest air monitoring station being 30 miles away is not an oversight. It's a structural choice that makes harm harder to prove. Affected communities should demand independent environmental monitoring as a condition of approval, not a reactive response after residents start getting sick.
Ratepayer protections with teeth. The state should not approve utility infrastructure built for a specific private corporation without ironclad, unconditional guarantees that ordinary ratepayers will not bear stranded costs if that corporation leaves. The current framework puts too much faith in the word of companies whose financial structures are designed to limit liability.
Community benefit agreements. If a corporation is receiving billions in tax breaks from a state, it should be legally bound to specific, measurable benefits for the communities closest to the project — infrastructure improvements, local hiring with real definitions, health monitoring, and recourse if it leaves.
Notification protocols that actually reach people. As I wrote in January, legal publication in a newspaper is not meaningful notification. It is a legal fiction. Communities need direct, proactive outreach, in plain language, in enough time to respond.
VII. What I Know About Louisiana
Here's what I also know: Louisiana communities are not passive. We are not waiting.
The Gulf States Newsroom is monitoring the air in Richland Parish because residents asked them to. Environmental advocates have been fighting this deal at every regulatory level available to them. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Rural Roots, the Descendants Project, and Inclusive Louisiana showed up at a mundane LED hearing in December and said, publicly and on the record: enough.
That is what civic power looks like when formal channels fail. It is not glamorous. It does not go viral. But it is real, and it matters.
I'm watching Holly Ridge because what happens there will happen again. Amazon has announced plans for a $12 billion data center near Shreveport. The AI infrastructure boom is not slowing down. Louisiana will be asked, again and again, to be the site of someone else's fortune.
The question is whether we will keep allowing the terms of that fortune to be negotiated in secret, ratified without community input, and borne, in their consequences, by the people who had the least say in the deal.
That is not economic development. That is extraction with better branding.
And Louisiana has seen that before.
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