Can AI Save This Failing Rural Economy?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Riley Griffin** (0:10)
All right, Riley Griffin, reporter with Bloomberg News here.
I am driving up to northeastern Louisiana, a rural part of the state called Richland Parish. This is cotton land, cotton, corn, soybeans.

**Sarah Holder** (0:29)
Riley Griffin typically spends her days in Silicon Valley. She's a tech reporter for Bloomberg.
But for the past year, she's been following a story that's brought her to a different corner of the country, a place called Richland Parish in the Louisiana Delta.

**Riley Griffin** (0:45)
Gas is cheaper than where I live in San Francisco, that's for sure.

**Sarah Holder** (0:50)
Richland Parish is made up of a handful of towns and villages, Rayville, Delhi, Mangum, and some unincorporated land.
All told, the parish spans about 550 square miles. It's nearly 12 times the size of San Francisco, but has a population 40 times smaller.

**Riley Griffin** (1:10)
I'm driving out here, I'm listening to Tim McGraw. Unlany, Wilson, both of whom are from this area.

**Sarah Holder** (1:24)
Richland, like so many agricultural and manufacturing communities around the US., has spent decades on the decline. Farmers are struggling to break even. Most kids don't go to college. When they do leave, they often don't come back.
Local leaders have been looking for something to revamp the area's economy. An opportunity that would bring new investment to town.
And a few years ago, one came knocking.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:52)
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been ramping up spending on artificial intelligence.

**Sarah Holder** (1:58)
Meta is worth $1.5 trillion and owns some of the biggest social media brands in the world.
But the technology landscape has been changing. AI is everywhere, and by many metrics, Meta has fallen behind.

**Rachael Peterson** (2:12)
This is an AI arms race.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:14)
Inside the company called OpenAI. Anthropic is building generative AI, a system that can draft content as if a human made it.

**Riley Griffin** (2:23)
Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, these are known as the frontier of the AI race right now. People don't often mention Meta in the same breadth, and that's a problem for the company.

**Sarah Holder** (2:37)
Just last month, the company laid off 8,000 workers, 10% of its workforce, as it ramps up spending on AI development and infrastructure. Infrastructure like data centers, which house the chips that power large language models.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has plans to build one of the biggest data centers in the world, nearly 4,000 acres, the size of about 3,000 football fields. He's calling it Hyperion, after the Greek Titan.

**Riley Griffin** (3:11)
Mark Zuckerberg is a man who loves a reference to the classics.

**Sarah Holder** (3:15)
It's a project that will take a lot of investment, a lot of energy and water, and a lot of land. Enter Richland Parish.

**Mike Johnson** (3:25)
You know, you've heard of Silicon Valley, right? We're in Silicon Valley.

**Sarah Holder** (3:29)
Meta's plans for this rural slice of Louisiana have captured the attention of some of the most powerful people in the world.

**SPEAKER_8** (3:35)
Look at that.

**Donald Trump** (3:36)
That's the size of Manhattan.

**Sarah Holder** (3:38)
But as Meta zeros in on the parish, residents are grappling with what it could mean to become the epicenter of the company's biggest AI push yet.

**Friday Ellis** (3:47)
20 years from now, AI may be as obsolete as bag phones are today.

**Dustin Morris** (3:53)
The math eventually becomes hard math at some point.

**SPEAKER_12** (3:56)
I don't want it to affect detrimentally our water, nor the price of utilities.

**Dustin Morris** (4:04)
We don't fully grasp what's coming.

**Sarah Holder** (4:12)
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Richland parishes bet on a new kind of crop, data.
Could Meta's ambitions bring economic salvation? Or will the community trade one uncertain future for another?

**Susan Bourgeois** (4:35)
No more unchecked data centers.

**Sarah Holder** (4:39)
When a new data center arrives in an area, the community reaction can sometimes sound like this.

**Donald Trump** (4:45)
We're not buying it. We want them to go away. We don't want to hear all of their sugar-coated promises, which we don't believe.

**Mike Johnson** (4:52)
It's a really, really bad deal. We don't get anything for it, other than we're losing land, we're losing water, and we're losing air quality.

**Sarah Holder** (4:58)
There are about 3,000 active data centers in the US.,
and as the AI boom demands more and more computing resources, their numbers are growing. According to Pew Research Center, 1,500 more data centers are in development right now, across the country. These facilities tend to be polarizing. Politicians, activists, and residents near them have called out data centers for hiking local energy bills, draining water resources, making too much noise. Many data center projects have been delayed, canceled, or scaled back after communities oppose them.