Inside Meta's $27B AI Boomtown: Chaos, Tacos, and a Small Louisiana Parish Transformed

On a recent morning in Rayville, Louisiana — a small town most Americans couldn't find on a map — Tim and Lindsey Allen were preparing 1,600 tacos. The menu: "Divine Swine" (smoked pork), "Righteous Rooster" (braised chicken), and "Golden Calf" (brisket). Their customers? Thousands of construction workers building Meta's Hyperion AI data center, the largest the company has ever built.

The Allens' improbable catering business is a microcosm of what's happening in Richland Parish, northeast Louisiana — a place Fortune described as being turned upside down by the AI infrastructure boom. Meta announced in December 2024 that it was investing in a $10 billion facility on 2,250 acres of rural land. Since then, the investment has ballooned: as of March 2026, Fortune reports the total project value has grown toward $27 billion, with Meta recently acquiring an additional 1,400 acres adjacent to the original site.

A Parish Transformed — for Better and Worse

The scale is almost incomprehensible for a community that had been losing population and jobs for decades. The Hyperion site covers more than 4 million square feet. The expanded landholding is now more than twice the size of New Orleans' nearest international airport. Meta has committed to creating 500 full-time jobs and has already contracted more than $875 million with Louisiana businesses.

For local entrepreneurs who positioned themselves correctly, the returns have been extraordinary. The Allens, who had long dreamed of starting a taco joint, seized the moment — landing recurring catering contracts with Mortenson, one of the project's three major contractors. "It's been a huge blessing for us," Tim Allen told Fortune.

But the boom has also exposed the chaotic underside of mega-scale AI infrastructure build-outs. Not everyone has benefited.

"You talk about supporting the local community, but then you outsource the work. It felt like a slap in the face." — Katie Stewart, owner of Opal's Orange Food Truck

Katie and Logan Stewart invested more than $40,000 of their life savings into a food truck, expecting steady business from construction workers. For a while, it worked — 100 to 120 orders a day. Then DPR, one of the main contractors, brought in an out-of-state catering company to feed workers on-site, and foot traffic evaporated overnight.

The AI Infrastructure Land Rush

The Richland Parish story is playing out in communities across America as hyperscalers race to lock up land and power for AI data center campuses. The economics are simple: training cutting-edge AI models requires massive amounts of electricity and compute, and rural areas often offer cheaper land, available power infrastructure, and supportive local governments eager for economic development.

Meta's Hyperion project will deliver over two gigawatts of compute capacity when complete — enough to train future generations of open-source large language models. The company has committed more than $300 million to improve local infrastructure including roads, water, and wastewater systems.

Rob Cleveland, president and CEO of GrowNELA — the economic development organization for northeast Louisiana — acknowledged the growing pains. "It's happening very quickly and it's happening exponentially," he said, while noting that "several thousand new jobs have already arrived in the rural Richland Parish community — both working on the Meta site and for businesses servicing the site."

The Human Cost of the AI Gold Rush

What Fortune's deep dive makes clear is that the AI infrastructure boom isn't just a story about capital and compute. It's a story about real communities — their housing markets, their roads, their local businesses, and their residents — being swept up in a transformation they had little say in and little time to prepare for.

Traffic has surged on roads not built for heavy equipment. Housing costs have spiked, pricing out longtime residents. Local businesses that positioned themselves well have thrived; others that guessed wrong have been crushed. The promise of economic revitalization is real — but so are the dislocations that come with any boomtown dynamic.

As AI companies pour hundreds of billions into physical infrastructure over the coming years, the Richland Parish story will likely become a template — for both what can go right and what nearly always goes wrong.