One Parish, One Aquifer, One Data Center: Who's Watching the Water?

Richland Parish, Louisiana runs its entire government — roads, courthouse, library, drainage — on $13.86 million a year.▸ Meta is building a single data center inside that parish for more than $10 billion — 721 times the parish's own books. The state let Meta register wells capable of pulling 23 million gallons a day from the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer, roughly 15 times what Meta itself says it expects to use once the facility is running. Nobody is required to check which number turns out to be true.

The Louisiana Legislative Auditor's audited financial statements for the Richland Parish Police Jury — the parish's governing body — put total governmental fund revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024 at $13,863,242, spread across the general fund, road maintenance, drainage, the health unit, the library, and every other fund the parish runs.▸ Meta's own project page puts its Louisiana investment at "$10B+," and Louisiana Economic Development's announcement puts the figure the same way: $10 billion for a single campus, in a parish whose government collects less money in a year than Meta spends on the project in about four hours. Meta separately committed more than $200 million in local infrastructure — roads and water systems — which is itself more than 14 times the parish's total annual revenue. In exchange, the project qualifies for a state sales-tax exemption on data-center equipment under Act 730 and a property-tax Payment in Lieu of Taxation, on top of the standard Quality Jobs program.

For the jobs, Meta's own figures show what that money buys locally: 500 or more permanent positions, against more than 5,000 construction workers at peak build-out — a temporary crew ten times the size of the permanent one.

The water story runs on a looser standard than the jobs numbers.▸ Louisiana's Department of Conservation and Energy (formerly the Department of Energy and Natural Resources) doesn't issue water-use permits the way it issues drilling permits — it registers wells and can only flag a concern, not block one. State officials warned Meta's subsidiary between July and September 2024 that nine proposed wells posed environmental risk; by May 2025 the company had cut the request to six wells, and the state approved them at a combined capacity of 23 million gallons a day — down from an initial roughly 36 million, but still far above what Meta itself projects it will actually pump. Meta's own estimate, cited in the same reporting, is 500 to 600 million gallons a year, or about 1.5 million gallons a day on average — a fifteenth of what the permit allows.

That gap matters because nobody is on the hook to keep the real number close to the low one.▸ Patrick Courreges, the department's spokesperson, told NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune the state's authority stops at flagging a concern — "that's the limit of our authority, saying: 'We think there's a concern.'" Meta has agreed only to voluntarily submit annual water-use reports for its first five years, and the state, by its own spokesperson's account, keeps no running inventory of water use in the area at all — there is no local water authority with jurisdiction to check the number independently. An LSU Water Resources Research Institute simulation, led by its director Frank Tsai and reported in the same NOLA.com investigation, modeled 17 years of pumping at the maximum permitted rate and found groundwater levels could fall more than 65 feet beneath parts of the site — a scenario Tsai said would not likely occur if usage tracks Meta's own lower estimate, but one the permit itself does nothing to prevent.

Figures describe the Richland Parish, Louisiana data center project only, as reported by the cited state records, state economic-development announcement, and Meta's own disclosures; other Meta or industry data centers are not included in these totals.