Tiny Louisiana parish becomes AI boomtown as Meta builds $10B data center: 'It's changing fast'

RICHLAND PARISH — The S Mart in Bee Bayou has always done a brisk business.

It's the only convenience store for miles amid the corn and soybean fields that line the old two-lane La. 80 in rural northeast Louisiana, and the only place to get heaping to-go plates of fried chicken gizzards with mac and cheese.

But everything suddenly changed this year — ever since Facebook parent company Meta broke ground on a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center in the middle of a cornfield in nearby Holly Ridge.

Now the store is slammed. Construction workers in neon safety vests stream in nonstop for food, ice, cigarettes and gas. Sales have more than tripled. Store manager Ann Watson, 70, a Bee Bayou native, can't hire enough workers to staff the store’s shifts.

“We’re so busy we don’t get a break,” Watson said as she boxed personal pizzas fresh out of the oven and stacked them in a warming case. “They start lining up before 6 a.m.”

The boom isn’t confined to the S Mart. Across Richland Parish, where the Meta site is located, land speculators are buying up property, paying 20 or 30 times more than they would have a year ago.

RV parks and “man camps” are sprouting up in small towns nearby to accommodate the 5,000 temporary workers beginning to arrive in a parish with a population of 20,000.

New business permits have tripled since the beginning of the year. Three new hotels and a Dollar General are in the works. And all day, every day, construction vehicles, big rigs pulling flatbed trailers and deep-bladdered dump trucks rumble up and down the country roads.

“The traffic and the noise don’t stop,” said Watson.

In a place where life has always moved slowly, residents say the rapid change is at once exciting and unsettling. No one ever thought Richland Parish would be a boom town. No one, they say, ever thought much about Richland Parish at all.

Now, parish assessor Lee Brown says everyone wants a piece of the action.

“It’s changing fast and we might as well get used to it,” Brown said. “In 10 years, you’re not going to recognize Richland Parish.”

Opportunity and concern

The scale of the Meta project is hard to fathom, even as it takes shape. Sitting on 2,250 acres, it will consist of several buildings totaling 4 million square feet — about the equivalent of 70 football fields — each lined with racks of powerful computers racing to outsmart the human brain. It will consume an estimated three times more electricity in a year than the entire city of New Orleans. 

It will also create some 5,000 construction jobs and up to 500 permanent ones. The project has been championed by everyone from Gov. Jeff Landry to local public officials, who say any number of new jobs is welcome in a parish that ranks among the poorest in the state.

But the potential environmental impacts are raising concerns from advocacy groups and some residents. They worry about the area’s water supply, and whether residents will face problems if the local aquifer is tapped to cool the powerful computers.

They also fear that ratepayers will ultimately be saddled with higher electricity bills.

The project has been on a fast track since early 2024, when Landry’s administration began working behind closed doors to woo Meta to the site. Landry is focused on the potential benefits that the data center will bring to the area.

“The development taking place in Richland Parish is the start of an economic renaissance in north Louisiana and throughout the entire state,” Landry said in a statement. “The investment by Meta is a once-in-a-lifetime transformational opportunity. I am confident that we will look back at this project as the catalyst that truly diversified Louisiana’s economy.”

Back in the old days

Ronnie Powell, 68, has been watching the transformation from the front porch of his trailer, which sits directly across a two-lane road from the Meta construction site.

He grew up in Holly Ridge on land where his family has lived for more than 80 years. His grandfather was a sharecropper for the Franklins, the wealthy, land-owning family that sold what is now the Meta site to the state of Louisiana in the early 2000s in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to lure a Toyota plant to the state.

Powell remembers riding around as a tiny child in “Mr. George” Franklin’s Jeep Wagoneer, back when the community was so tight-knit that the richest man in town looked after a sharecropper's kid.

He remembers his family always having enough corn to eat.

He remembers the old Thompson store up the road — recently sold to make way for what locals say will be a 24-hour liquor store — where kids would go for ice cream or a Coke.

And he remembers being skeptical when he heard rumors that Meta was planning something big for the Franklin Farms site, a piece of land he knew like his own.

In the months since, he’s watched as the field he overlooks was cleared, the ground excavated, utility poles installed and cables buried. Modular buildings and massive cranes dot the landscape. Construction vehicles kick up a constant swirl of dust and the two-lane road that once accommodated mostly tractors has already been re-paved.

“I hate to see the times changing,” Powell said over the roar of an oversized backhoe. “I loved the small farms. Everybody helped one another.”

‘People want to be here’

Truth be told, the times have been changing in Richland Parish for decades, it just wasn’t happening at such a breakneck pace and was largely a study in stagnation and decline.

Farming is no longer tenable except for the wealthiest farmers and largest farms. The population in the parish has remained flat since 1990. Seven of the eight cotton gins in operation back then have since closed down. There's still plenty of corn and soybeans, but fewer small farms and fewer farm-related jobs.

Economic development officials in the parish, with a median annual income of $30,000, have been trying to jumpstart the local economy for years. The Meta project is the supercharge they've been waiting for.

“Our leads have more than doubled since the beginning of the year,” said Rob Cleveland, president and CEO of Grow NELA, the regional economic development organization. “People want to be here because of Meta.”

Examples abound. A Houston-based subcontractor on the project is leasing a 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Monroe to build a new pipe fabrication facility.

Another Texas company, 4-Horn Trench and Shoring, is opening a Shreveport office to supply equipment and workers to the site and other spinoff businesses, creating 10 new jobs in the short term and more, the company suggests, in the future.

Southern States Equipment of Ruston is leasing construction equipment to subcontractors. Baton Rouge-based Five S, which does heavy civil construction, is filling the site with crush aggregate it has brought down from its quarry in Missouri.

The rooftop bar at the new Hotel Monroe in downtown Monroe is a popular gathering spot for the managers and executives overseeing the project.

“On any given night, they may have 15 or so rooms,” said developer and owner Mike Echols, who opened the hotel in June. “We think that will pick up dramatically.”

Gold rush mentality

In a rural community where everyone knows one another, the newcomers stand out. Their accents are different. Their T-shirts and baseball caps bear the logos of national firms and faraway employers.

Jason Magee arrived in mid-July and was the first to lay down his stake in the Bee Bayou RV Park, which had opened for business just days earlier.

A Birmingham native, Magee is a mechanical contractor who has followed opportunity around the country. Jobs have taken him out west to build nuclear power plants and back east to work on refineries. The Meta site will keep him in Richland Parish for the next two to three years, he thinks.

“They pay a travel package, so it’s good money,” said Magee, who lives in a souped-up RV he bought from his dad and stepmom.

He can sense the gold rush mentality that has taken hold of the area. The owner of his RV park is planning to invest several million dollars to build up to 70 pads as well as single-family homes, he says.

He’s already conversant in the local gossip about the eye-popping prices speculators are rumored to be paying for raw dirt.

“A lot of people are making money around here,” he said.

Getting overwhelmed

Soon, much larger lodging sites will open. A mile or so down the road, construction is underway on Mammoth Industries’ Holly Ridge Lodge and RV Resort, a 130-acre workforce housing development that will accommodate 300 RVs and 1,000 workers in modular buildings. Its amenities will include soccer fields, basketball courts, a barbershop and a theater.

Monroe-based developer John Lauve’s company, Corporate Mobile Housing, is also building one in nearby Dunn, an unincorporated area that consists of an interstate exit, a church, some long-abandoned weather-beaten structures and a potato processing plant.

Lauve’s Dunn Village and RV Park is directly across from the potato plant in the shadows of a water tower. Workers have begun clearing the grassy field to make way for the RV pads and modular buildings that will eventually accommodate 550 workers and include a cafeteria and workout facility.

“The infrastructure around here is going to get overwhelmed pretty quickly,” said Lauve, who scouted out seven or eight sites before landing on the parcel in Dunn earlier this spring. “That’s why they need people like us to build personnel facilities.”

The activity is spawning a real estate frenzy. Farmland that averaged $2,500 an acre a year ago is being offered for $50,000 to $60,000 an acre today, according to listings. Property owners have put giant "for sale" signs up in the yards of their homes, farms and vacant lots.

Locals spread the word about who got what for their property. Verifying the information is difficult, Brown, the assessor said. Many sale prices are being recorded as a nominal amount, like $100 “and other valuable considerations.” Some real estate brokers are being asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Powell recently fielded an offer for his 5-acre property for $54,000 an acre. Most of his friends have already sold and moved away.

“We haven’t really decided what we’re going to do,” said Powell, who lives on the property with his wife, daughter, two grandchildren and one of his five great-grandchildren. “This property belongs to the whole family.”

Hope for the future

Shelbie and Jeffery Stephenson see opportunity and hope in the Meta project.

They’ve set up their Hebrews Coffee and Eats Food Truck across the road from the entrance to the construction site. With its menu of specialty lattes and pressed paninis, it looks like it belongs in a trendy big city neighborhood.

In the middle of Holly Ridge, it looks like a mirage.

“When I heard Meta was coming, I said, ‘We gotta be there,’” said Shelbie Stephenson, who bought a franchise and the used food truck in a matter of weeks last December from the owner of the original Hebrews brick and mortar store in nearby Rayville.

Things came together for the couple quickly. They opened in February, not long after contractors had begun clearing the fields. Shelbie Stephenson went up to the construction trailers, menus in hand.

The first week, they sold out of pastries every day. The second week, they got a call from the catering director of one of the big contractors, asking if they could do 500 breakfast burritos.

“I’m not a ‘no’ kind of person, even though I wasn’t sure how we’d make it happen,” she said.

They made it happen. Now, they cater lunch twice a month for the contractor and do a bustling daily breakfast business.

The Stephensons see this as their one shot to stay in north Louisiana. Until they bought the food truck, Jeffery Stephenson was working offshore, facetiming their three young daughters before bed every night. Now he can tuck them in.

“Times are changing,” he said. “Either you adapt or get left behind.”

Nearby, Chris Beard is selling hamburgers and daily lunch specials from his Chillin' Out food truck. He's also grateful for the influx of new customers. But he is a generation older than the Stephensons and worries about the changes.

"It's progress," Beard said. "But the sense of community is gone." 

Getting out

Greg and Jeanne Thompson have decided they want no part of it.    

Thompson’s family has owned land all around the project site for decades, and he’d planned to spend his retirement in the spacious ranch-style home his parents built for $18,000 in the early 1960s.

Now, he’s selling his land as fast as he can, and fetching more than $50,000 an acre for some parcels.

“I don’t want to spend my retirement years across the road from a natural gas turbine,” said Thompson, 66, who doesn’t know yet where they’ll go.

The Thompsons are bitter that locals didn’t have a say in the project, though there isn’t much they could have done to stop it. The state had secured the site years earlier for the Toyota plant, and there aren’t any zoning rules in Richland Parish anyway.

Jeanne Thompson worries that the new development — hotels, man camps, dollar stores — won’t create good-paying jobs or sustainable wealth and will leave the parish with a lot of junk real estate when the boom is over and things settle down.

“The kind of jobs they’re creating won’t help the folks who live out here,” she said. “They’re farmers. That is all they have ever known.”

Greg Thompson is sad his four grandsons, who live in Monroe and come visit on weekends, won’t be able to enjoy the land he and his brothers grew up on. He understands that things change. This is more than change.

“Our way of life is fixing to disappear,” he said.

Brown, the assessor, is philosophical about it. He feels bad for the families that have lived on the land for generations. He also thinks Meta is creating opportunities for the parish.

"There is good and bad in everything," Brown said. "It is change. Some people have accepted it easier than others."