A year ago, Louisiana wasn't even in the running. Today it hosts the largest development in the state's history — a data center that will use seven times as much electricity as New Orleans, cover roughly six square miles, and cost $50 billion. It got built the way Governor Jeff Landry says these things get built now: quietly, fast, and with the public finding out only after the terms were already set.
A New York Times investigation — more than 40 interviews, corporate filings, tax records, property records, meeting transcripts — lays out exactly how. This desk isn't second-sourcing its way to the same story. The reporting is the story. What follows is what it means.
The Bill That Got Hijacked
In April 2024, Louisiana's revenue secretary got an urgent message from the governor's office: get a pending bill passed, because it was needed for something else. The bill had started as a tax rebate for fiber-optic equipment. By the time it passed the House less than two months later, it had been rewritten into a tax rebate for data-center equipment, before Meta had been named publicly as the reason. The governor's own economic development secretary told staff directly: "Leaks kill deals. If this leaks and we lose this deal, if I find out it was you, you're fired."
Over 50 government officials have signed NDAs with Landry's economic development office since he took office in January 2024, a practice the prior administration didn't use at this scale.
The Senator Who Voted, Then Sold
State Senator Jay Morris co-wrote a bill that helped land the deal, voted for the tax rebate, spoke in support of Entergy's power expansion to state regulators, and signed an NDA with Entergy. Then, last September, he sold 300 acres he co-owned near the data center site — to Entergy. Land near the site has gone from $3,000–5,000 an acre to over $50,000. Morris disclosed the sale but not the price, and says there's no conflict of interest. "I'm probably more popular now in my district than I ever have been," he said. STOCK Act →
Who Actually Holds the Risk
Meta structured itself an exit. It can walk away from its lease after four years. Blue Owl, the Wall Street credit firm that put $7 billion into the joint venture, is locked in for 24. Blue Owl financed its stake by selling roughly $27 billion in bonds, one of the largest private bond issues ever placed. Among the buyers: PIMCO, which manages money for teachers' pension funds. A teacher's retirement account is now downstream risk on whether Mark Zuckerberg keeps leasing a data center in a Louisiana flood plain.
No insurer would fully cover the facility — it's too large, and it sits in the Louisiana Delta flood plain. Coverage tops out around $4 billion on what is now a $50 billion project. Per investor documents, if a natural disaster shuts the facility down for more than two years, Meta can walk away without paying the remaining debt on its lease. Blue Owl has publicly denied the project is underinsured. The insurance industry's own assessment, from an executive who declined to cover it: "To build it in a flood plain, it's crazy."
Louisiana's power commission approved the project's gas turbines 4–1, skipping the independent administrative-judge review that's typically required before approval. It's legal, but a real shortcut. The lone dissenting commissioner, Davante Lewis, said plainly: "I believe my most important job as a regulator is to trust, but verify. And the truth is there's a lot of things that I just cannot verify at this moment."
Who Didn't Get a Seat at the Table
Tracy Williams lived in a Richland Parish trailer park for over a decade. Last July, her rent went from $250 a month to $1,495 with a month's notice, priced out by incoming construction workers. She couldn't afford to move the trailer. She watched a machine take it apart and "crush it like a can." She and her four children slept in their car for three weeks. At least five trailer parks in the parish have been remade to house data-center workers.
"Nobody picked up the phone and asked us if we wanted this," a local pastor said. "But the reality is, this is an opportunity." Both things are true at once, and this desk isn't going to pretend the tension resolves cleanly. Sales tax revenue in Richland Parish is up 2,000 percent since construction started. Some local teachers got $50,000 bonuses. Tracy Williams did not.
No law appears to have been broken. A legal ethics professor quoted in the underlying reporting is careful to frame this as a public-confidence question, not a criminal one — this desk treats it the same way.
Whether Senator Morris's land sale to Entergy was priced at, above, or below fair market value is not established; the sale price was not disclosed in filings and Morris declined to provide one.
Whether Meta specifically anticipated needing its four-year exit option, versus including it as standard deal architecture, is not documented; this desk notes the asymmetry between Meta's exit terms and Blue Owl's and Entergy's exposure without asserting intent.
Whether ratepayers will ultimately bear turbine costs depends on whether Meta stays for the life of the project — a natural disaster, a change in AI economics, or a corporate decision could each trigger it, and none has happened yet.
This desk has not independently verified PIMCO's specific bond holdings within the $27 billion issue beyond what is stated in the underlying reporting.