The $50,000 teacher bonuses and Meta's case for the data centre

Chamath Palihapitiya introduced the subject with a polling number: data centres are running at minus 80 in the United States, he said, and almost nobody in the room had been to a place where the opposition is not the whole story. Meta's president and vice chairwoman, Dina Powell McCormick, had brought two of those places with her — a Louisiana superintendent named Sheldon, a Louisiana commerce secretary named Susan, and a short film about the parish Meta's largest data-centre investment landed in 1.

Her answer to the polling number was not a rebuttal of it. It was an admission that the industry lost the argument before it started: "I don't think that our industry has done a good job communicating. Just flat out." What follows from that, in her telling, is not better messaging but a bargain the company has to be able to point to — and one parish, Richland Parish, as the proof.

The parish had been losing people. Average wages before the investment were roughly $36,000 to $38,000 a year, McCormick said, and the superintendent described a school system whose best students left and did not come back because there was nothing to come back to. The data centre changed the arithmetic through an indirect channel that matters more than any promise the company made.

Louisiana takes sales tax at the point of construction. Sheldon's account of the effect: the Richland Parish school board collects 51% of the taxes in a parish with six taxing entities, and its share of sales tax collections ran at the normal 5% to 10% of the total until construction began, then reached 60% to 70%. The half-cent check that went out in December 2025 doubled from the year before, from roughly $4,000 to roughly $8,000. The June payment was the one that startled people: certified employees received about $40,000 more than usual, a figure that reached $50,000 in the case of one check discussed on stage, for a net gain of about $45,000 across the two payments. Teachers in the parish have been reported receiving bonuses above $50,000 this year 2.

The superintendent's phone, on his account, now rings with teachers from across Louisiana asking to move. The mechanism is a state law that sends surplus tax revenue to school employees, which is why the gain shows up as a bonus rather than as a budget line — and why it is a windfall tied to construction rather than a permanent revenue stream.

The panel moved through the three complaints that communities raise, and McCormick answered each with what Meta agreed to in this one deal.

On power: Meta contracted with Entergy to pay for its own generation, and also for grid resilience, grid upgrades and hurricane storm costs in a state where it does not otherwise operate — a structure, McCormick argued, that takes cost off Louisiana ratepayers rather than adding to it. On water: the site sits on former farmland, and the design Meta chose was more expensive but uses less water than the land consumed when it was being farmed. On benefits: the compact, as she described it, is to pay for your own electricity and work to push electricity costs down, to manage the water, and to fund teachers and first responders.

Louisiana has since built this into policy. The governor signed an executive order creating a framework for large electricity users, and the state offers a sales tax exemption that McCormick called critical to landing investment at this scale. Her read of the politics is that the state has made itself a "yes, and" jurisdiction while others are saying no, and that Meta's deal has become the template for what the state asks of the next one. The economic-development secretary's version of the same point is blunter: the state now gets to choose between suitors.

Meta's workforce programme is the part of the argument that is easiest to measure and easiest to under-deliver on. The company needed fibre technicians — the people who lay and cut the cable every data centre requires — and could not find them, so it wrote a curriculum with CBRE and others: five weeks, safety training, a "job site ready" certification, and a guaranteed job on a Meta site for anyone who graduates, portable to other employers.

That became America's Workforce Academy, launched about four months ago. By McCormick's count, 40,000 Americans applied, 250 have graduated, and 90% of them are still in the roles. The design decision that makes it work for the people it is aimed at is that the programme pays trainees what the job pays from the first day, because the people it recruits — waitresses, Uber drivers, home health aides — cannot afford unpaid training. Susan's counterpart observation from the state side is that union leadership now campaigns against the anti-data-centre backlash, having told candidates that they will only be supported if they support the build-out.

The gap between 40,000 applicants and 250 graduates is the number the audience did not dwell on. McCormick's answer is capacity: the programme needs a model data-centre site to train on, which is why expansion runs through community colleges, VFW halls and the Association of Builders and Contractors, and why Google's Ruth Porat, BlackRock's Larry Fink and General Motors are being drawn into an alliance the companies describe as competing on models and products but not on people.

Asked why the opposition is winning, McCormick's answer split in two. The credible half was procedural: communities that do not want a data centre should be able to opt out. The other half was attribution. She said she had recently met with the Senate intelligence committee's chairman and vice chairman, who believe they have evidence that adversaries are amplifying the backlash — then added, "I can't comment on that," before putting the same thought in conditional form: if you wanted to stop America right now, this is what you would try to do.

That is a claim about foreign influence whose evidence has not been made public, and the panel treated it as such — she offered no documents, and none of the hosts pressed for them. What she was willing to state flatly was narrower and more useful: the industry's communication problem is real, and the burden of proof sits with the companies, not with the towns.

The $17 billion teen-safety settlement came up, and it is the largest part of Meta's current political exposure. Under the agreement with the states, users under 18 are limited to two hours a day on Facebook and Instagram, the app shuts off overnight, and notifications are barred during the school day 3. McCormick said Meta would reduce the limit to one hour and add $5 billion if YouTube, TikTok and Snap sign on to the same terms. David Sacks argued the other side of the case, calling much of the litigation a shakedown of a voluntary product, and said he nonetheless liked the new defaults.

The closing subject was the glasses. Ten years of engineering, an exclusive partnership with Ray-Ban's parent, live translation, and a use case nobody planned for: blind veterans reading a church screen and, in one account from the panel, calling a son independently for the first time. It is also where McCormick drew the line between Meta and the labs pushing for a slower frontier. The question, she said, is not whether safety matters — she described it as the premise — but what you do with the technology once it exists. Zuckerberg's position, in her rendering, rests on twenty years of building products for 3.6 billion daily users: the more widely the capability is distributed, the better. That is the argument the parish film was there to support, and the argument the polling number says has not been won.