The company said Monday its Hyperion supercluster in Richland Parish will expand to a 5-gigawatt facility costing more than $50 billion, making it Meta’s largest data center and one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects in the world. The site was earlier projected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of compute capacity, the kind of power needed to train the large language models behind tools like ChatGPT. When construction began in 2024, the price tag was $10 billion.

That means the cost of the project has quintupled in less than two years, largely thanks to deep-pocketed private capital and the state’s willingness to forgo tax revenue to land the deal. In late 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law making data centers built before 2029 sales-tax-exempt for 20 years.

But missing out on tax revenue doesn’t appear to bother Landry. In a Monday statement, he said since the deal was signed, the state has “secured more than $150 billion in new investment by creating an environment where companies can move quickly and build at scale.”

Some business owners appear to be on the same page, claiming their workers are earning more with additional people and resources.

“We’ve been in the charter bus business for 29 years, but nothing compares to what Meta’s project has meant for us,” Scott Holmes, owner of local business Mayo Tours, said in a statement. “We went from 40 coaches to 102, and most of our drivers onsite are now earning over $80,000 a year in a region where the median income is $42,000.”

But not all locals see this behemoth of a data center project as good for the area. Hyperion sits in a parish of about 20,000 people, one of the poorest in Louisiana, and the expansion is reviving hard questions about who ultimately foots the bill for a project of this scale. 

The buildout has already brought heavier traffic, rising rents, and even attempted evictions as thousands of construction workers pour into the area, former Fortune AI writer Sharon Goldman reported this spring. This has left many residents feeling that the project’s biggest decisions were locked in before they understood its scale, and that it’s now even bigger than originally expected.

“Meanwhile, there is literally a sign outside welcoming Meta workers while local families are left wondering where they’re supposed to go,” Erika James, a 34-year-old mother of two who grew up in Richland Parish and now lives in a mobile home park in Monroe about 30 minutes away from the Meta site, told Fortune’s Goldman. “We are now having to entertain the idea of leaving the area completely. 

“There is nowhere to go if you can’t pay triple prices,” she continued.

Some of the state’s own dealmakers have also been more vocal about the trade-offs. Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois told the Times-Picayune that Meta made it clear when the deal was first being discussed that it wouldn’t be done without incentives.

“It was ‘If you don’t have this, we will not consider your state,'” Bourgeois said. One lawyer who helped negotiate the deals also said the point of the deal wasn’t to be “nice and welcoming.”

“We’re only giving this to get them here,” Mike Busada, a Shreveport attorney who helped negotiate the deals with Meta, told the Times-Picayune. “We don’t want to give them a dollar more than we have to.”

To be sure, Meta isn’t skipping out on taxes entirely. While it’s exempt from state and local sales tax on the equipment inside Hyperion—the servers, chillers, and electrical infrastructure that make up most of its spending—it still pays a 1% local sales tax on its purchases. 

And because the construction cost is so enormous, even that 1% has made a difference for some locals. An ordinance funnels that 1% into school employee bonuses, which topped $50,000 for some local teachers, according to Meta. That’s a huge amount of money one recipient called “jaw-dropping,” considering the average teacher salary in Louisiana is $56,785, ranking them No. 49 in the nation, according to National Education Association data. 

Still, local officials concede that the windfall is tied to the construction phase and will likely shrink once construction ends. 

“Sales tax at that level may be somewhat temporary,” Scott Franklin, a director at the Richland Parish chamber of commerce, told The Wall Street Journal.

Meta also argues the project has “always been about more than building infrastructure,” according to Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers at Meta.

“The people, workforce and partnership we’ve found in Louisiana have enabled this project to be a cornerstone of our global infrastructure,” she said in a statement. “With more than $1.6 billion already contracted with local companies and thousands of jobs being supported, we’re delivering real economic impact alongside the AI infrastructure that will power the future.”

Who pays for the power?

Another major concern about the project is the power bill it’ll produce. To supply Hyperion’s enormous electricity use, utility Entergy is building 10 new plants, along with 240 miles of new transmission lines, all paid for by Meta, which has also agreed to fund up to 2.5 gigawatts of renewable energy and signed what Entergy calls a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” 

Even so, consumer groups fear the project’s major demand could still push up rates for everyone else on the grid. In January, the environmental law group Earthjustice—representing the Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists—asked Louisiana regulators to investigate Meta’s financing arrangement with Blue Owl Capital, under which Meta sold off roughly 80% of the data center to a venture debt firm. 

“Louisiana ratepayers may have even less protection from the costs of this massive data center than they had just several months ago, which were already severely lacking,” Paul Arbaje, energy analyst at UCS, said in a statement. “The Commission must look further into Meta’s new financing structure to make sure that the bag Entergy’s customers are already holding hasn’t ballooned out of control.”

The Louisiana Public Service Commission declined to take up the probe in February.

“By dismissing this motion, the [Louisiana Public Service Commission] is giving the green light to more tech companies to use this kind of financial maneuvering to maximize profits while evading public accountability,” Susan Stevens Miller, senior attorney at Earthjustice, said in a statement.

Even Landry has moved to address the risk. In June, he directed his economic development agency to draft new rules meant to shield consumers from getting stuck with the cost of new power plants.

Louisiana is just a snapshot of the nation’s data center drama

The tension playing out in Richland Parish is also a national debate. As Meta races ahead with its multi-hundred-billion-dollar AI push, rivals Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon are also chasing the same tax breaks and energy deals from states scrambling for a piece of the AI boom. Amazon alone has committed $12 billion to data centers in northwest Louisiana.

And elsewhere, residents are equally as cautious of major data center projects. A Gallup poll conducted in March found that seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their local area, a higher share than those who oppose living near a nuclear power plant. Among opponents, many cited strain on resources such as water and energy, as well as higher utility bills.

Those concerns are already reshaping policy. In April, Maine became the first state to pass a bill barring the development of large-scale data centers, and a Wisconsin city approved a referendum giving voters more say over major tax-funded projects tied to a local data center campus.