“The next wave of exploitation will be in your water, and will come from your wallet.”
These are the words I spoke about Meta’s north Louisiana datacenter project in a now-viral video, reposted an unprecedented amount of times across all corners of the Internet to the tune of more than a million combined views.
I am a Cajun-born, lifelong Louisianan with a deep love for this state.
When I first spoke about the datacenter in August, I was frustrated. The previous year, I had run for a seat on the Louisiana Public Service Commission. I’m sure you can guess how that went as a Democrat in a district that is rated R+38, which means that it is 38 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole.
I was a longshot and first-time candidate, standing up for my values and fighting for the affordability of utilities: electric, gas, water, and even prison phone calls. I saw an opportunity to position Louisiana as a leader in clean energy, which I saw as a natural transition from our existing energy leadership.
Let’s be clear: I lost that election. Depending on your perspective, I either lost an election by 28 points, or narrowly missed a runoff by 3.8%. But either way, I earned over 110,000 votes, which was the fourth-most of any Democrat statewide (only surpassed by the vice president of the United States and two senior Democratic congressmen), and the most of any first-time candidate in Louisiana that year.
Louisiana could operate differently
During my campaign, I witnessed a shift in the bayous of south Louisiana, against all odds.
People showed up to forums and events where I was speaking. People listened. People shared my videos. People saw that maybe we could do things a little differently in the bayou state.
While I was unsuccessful at the ballot box, I remain committed to my reason for running for office: to help people and to fight against corruption.
No one likes corruption. The deals connected to this datacenter reek of it.
Because of the datacenter, for the first time in a long time, concern over corruption is being shared by Louisianans of all walks of life. It’s growing louder by the day. Democrats and Republicans, small towns and big cities alike all are concerned about a growing rise of corruption in our state, and especially from the Landry administration.
We just watched it play out locally in Baton Rouge, where the voters soundly rejected an attempt by Mayor “Coach” Sid Edwards to weaken the dedicated tax structure that protects our tax dollars from misuse. The mayor-president proposed taking $52 million from the library to balance the budget.
To stave off corruption, voters in the capital city called the bluff and voted down the proposal at the polls in November.
People are weary of corruption
The message is becoming loud and clear: voters are sick and tired of bad-faith deals that waste our hard-earned money and don’t make our lives any better.
People from all parts of Louisiana are extremely concerned about corruption coming to life in Rayville, with the datacenter.
The Public Service Commission’s approval of the power plants for this project by a 4-1 margin was disturbing. It sent a signal nationwide to all prospective datacenter companies: “Come to Louisiana, where they sell their people out for pennies on the dollar – and you won’t even have to put up much of a fight to make it happen!”
The annual campaign finance reports, due in February for contributions made during 2025, will prove particularly illuminating, since the legislature now allows Public Service Commissioners to accept $10,000 donations. We’ll soon see how deep corruption runs on this deal.
I’m not opposed to economic development. Far from it. When I was running my first business, a videogame development company, I fought relentlessly to create opportunities for our state to get noticed by major videogame companies.
Time and again, we would be passed up – even with great incentives. Companies simply didn’t want to come here because there wasn’t a talent pool, the political environment was unstable, and it was too much effort to build here versus creative centers like Seattle or San Francisco.
Apparently, Big Tech has changed their minds about Louisiana after this datacenter was announced. And it’s not for the better. They are no longer looking for talented Louisianans. They want a state that will willingly hand over its water and power.
Bringing no jobs and then taking way too much electricity and water
Datacenters don’t create jobs. Very, very few people work in a datacenter, and their specialized knowledge isn’t concentrated in a state like ours; so they’ll be hiring people from out of state and moving them here, regardless of what they promise. That’s problem number one.
Then, datacenters use an astonishing amount of water – the one in Rayville will use around five million gallons of water a day, and it won’t be river water. It’ll be our precious, and rapidly diminishing, groundwater. Problem number two.
And then, the electricity. Oh my goodness, the electricity. This datacenter will be larger than the island of Manhattan, and will use more than three times what the entire city of New Orleans uses on the hottest days in August. Problem number three.
The electricity needed by the datacenter is enough to power about twice the energy needed in New Orleans on a peak day, more than two million homes. For perspective, the population of Louisiana, as of the 2020 census, was 4.6 million. That will drive up the demand for electricity statewide, which will drive up your monthly light bill.
Each month, various charges added to your light bill will subsidize the datacenter. No matter where you are in Louisiana, this is a bad deal. The datacenter will poison our water and drive up our utility bills, even as our state leaders ignore the high costs for their constituents while posing for photos and bragging about Meta choosing Louisiana.
I wish I could tell you that there was something concrete we could do next. There are different permitting meetings along the way that we could attend and voice dissent at; there are potential land and water-use regulations that we could email our state legislators about. If those regulations changed, the construction process could slow down. And there is always time and space to speak out, educating our neighbors about what is coming.
But by all accounts, this datacenter is happening.
Stopping the next Louisiana datacenter
What we ultimately need to do is focus on the inevitable next datacenters. That means fighting to change the environment in which these deals happen.
It starts by following the money. When I ran for the PSC, I was the only candidate who didn’t take checks from utility companies. My opponent, the now-sitting commissioner of District 2, Jean-Paul Coussan, took maxed-out donations from every single one of them. The forthcoming annual reports will show if that has continued.
To change the way corruption ruins our state, we must also follow harmful deals at the earliest stages. Encourage your neighbors to show up when these deals come up at the PSC, in front of your parish council, and in the legislature.
Then we must change the people who make those decisions.
Two PSC seats are up for election this year. Statewide elections are next year, in 2027. All state offices, including every single seat in the legislature, will be up for re-election.
I encourage every interested Louisianan to run, contesting every seat in the legislature with a clear message: we will not stand idly by as our leaders rob this state and its hardworking people of an affordable future.
The tide is changing. People across the political spectrum are fed up with corruption and yearning for something better.
Let’s roll up our sleeves, let’s talk to our neighbors, let’s elect people who have the state’s best interest in mind. Together, we can stop the next bad deal before it’s a done deal.
Laborde, an HR and organizational development leader, is based in Baton Rouge.
