Donald Trump’s bold claim about $10,000 data center paychecks for every Louisiana resident near a new facility just hit a wall of local reality. A Louisiana TV station investigated the president’s story and found a very different picture on the ground.
Louisiana residents describe their experience near Meta’s Hyperion project
Two residents living near Meta’s Hyperion data center project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, told WWL-TV in New Orleans that they have not received any direct payments from Meta or anyone else. Their statements directly contradict Trump’s recent claim that everyone in a Louisiana community near a data center received $10,000 checks.
Trump made the claim during a Monday interview with Fox2 Detroit’s Roop Raj. He was responding to a question about a proposed moratorium on data centers in Michigan.
“We had a community in Louisiana, and they were really opposed,” Trump said. “All of a sudden, they got paid $10,000. Everyone living in the community got a check for $10,000, and everybody loved it.”
Louisiana’s economic development agency also confirmed no such payments exist. The agency’s spokesperson Emma Wagner told WWL-TV that she was unaware of any checks. “If there were $10,000 payments, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops,” Wagner said.
She suggested Trump may have confused the claim with $50,000 bonuses given to teachers in the Richland Parish school district. Those bonuses resulted from a surge in sales tax revenue driven by the data center’s construction.
The Hyperion project, when completed, will rank among the world’s largest data centers. Trump told Raj that communities near data centers are “becoming very rich” and “their taxes are going down.” He also posted on Truth Social earlier this week that unpopular projects “have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.”
However, public sentiment tells a different story. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of respondents would oppose a data center project in their community. Only 14 percent said they would support one being built near them. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
