Meta Data Center Opens $25-$30/Hour Jobs in LA

Thousands of construction workers are pouring into a small Louisiana community to build Meta’s largest-ever data center. The local college is scrambling to train the people who will run it. Called Hyperion, the project is rising in rural Richland Parish and covers nearly 10 million square feet. Meta says it will employ more than 7,500 trade workers on-site at peak construction and support 1,000 operational jobs once the facility is complete.

A Four-Week Ticket Into the Industry

Eric Crowe Jr., 27, is one of the students betting on that payoff. He enrolled in the Data Center Technician program at Louisiana Delta Community College’s West Monroe campus, less than an hour from the site. “I see AI is really the future,” Crowe Jr. told Business Insider. “We’re going to need data centers to house all the data. Why not get in now before it gets oversaturated?”

The course is short, but it isn’t cheap. Students pay nearly $3,700 for four weeks of instruction, and the college also offers the program at its Winnsboro campus. Students who finish can earn several certificates covering equipment operation and workplace safety. Dan McCarty, director of Workforce Trades at the college, put the goal plainly: “This is a stepping stone into the real world. We prepare you with a résumé. We work on every aspect of employability, safety, and technical skills.”

The results so far speak for themselves. The inaugural class graduated in March, and all 11 students received job offers from IES Communications, the firm employing people on Meta’s project. McCarty said the program now produces about 24 graduates a month. “In the past, a lot of people, including myself, had to leave here to find the good jobs,” he said. “Now they’re 30 minutes down the road.”

Wages Where Wages Were Thin

Pay is the reason the program is filling up. The region has no state minimum wage law, and agriculture is a major local industry, which has long meant modest paychecks for many families. Crowe Jr. previously handled packages and drove for FedEx, where he averaged $14 an hour. Now he expects to earn something closer to $25 to $30 an hour. “Here, I could make about $25 to $30 per hour,” he said. “It’s a no-brainer for lots of people to pivot.”

McCarty said entry-level positions could pay as much as $24 an hour, and graduates have told him they reached $27 to $28 an hour within six months. Business Insider reported in August that the median pay for data-center facility managers was $134,000, 64% higher than for other facilities managers. Project managers at data-center facilities earned a median of $115,000, 12% higher than similar roles elsewhere in the facilities field.

Trey Wadley, 30, came to the program from the automotive industry and has an interest in cybersecurity. He found the course while scrolling Facebook, which Meta owns. Wadley recently welcomed a baby girl and hopes to stay close to home. Without the local project, he said, he likely would have searched for work in Texas.

Skepticism Among Neighbors

Not everyone in Richland Parish is celebrating. Residents have mixed feelings about the facility: some predict it will bring jobs and lift the local economy, while others worry about environmental effects and disruptions to daily life. Crowe Jr. and Wadley acknowledge those concerns, but they don’t expect artificial intelligence to fade away. “I think we should focus more on solutions to how we can coexist with it,” Wadley said.

John Bradley, a broadband workforce development instructor, said he wishes a program like this had existed when he was a teenager. Instead, he chose construction and oil fields. “If I’d have had something like this that would’ve guaranteed me a good job, good money from the get go, and I could travel if I wanted to, I would’ve loved that,” he said. Bradley said the college has given contractors working with Meta a special email address, and those firms are waiting for graduates to finish the class.

Bradley also stressed that the training isn’t locked to one employer. “It doesn’t have to be a Meta data center,” he said. “You still got banks, you still got IT departments. You can literally go to work anywhere you want and use the same trades you learned here.”

Demand for seats is outpacing the college’s capacity. McCarty said a backlog of students is waiting to get in, and the college hopes to expand its offerings. Students range widely in age. “We’ve got some that are fresh outta high school, but we’ve had students up to 60 years old,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter what age you decide to get into this trade. Anyone is welcome to come in and learn it.”

Why This Matters: In a rural parish where agriculture dominates and the state sets no minimum wage, a single private investment is rewriting what a paycheck can look like. Meta is funding the buildout, a private contractor is hiring graduates, and a public community college is supplying the workforce at a cost of roughly $3,700 per student, with the market rather than a government mandate setting the wage. The arrangement puts individual choice at the center: students weigh the price of a short course against the prospect of $25-to-$30-an-hour work, and the skills they gain transfer to banks, IT departments and other employers if Meta’s demand ever cools. Residents are already raising questions about environmental effects and the disruption that comes with 7,500 construction workers arriving at once. Whether the boom leaves Richland Parish with durable, portable skills or a labor market that depends on a single employer will shape how much this project is worth to the community long after the cranes leave.