Trump tells Georgia to make data centers pay ‘$20,000 for everybody that lives in the community’

Trump has a plan for the data center fights tearing through Georgia: send an invoice. “And as far as data centers, we don’t want to get controversial,” he told the rally in Perry on Saturday. “Ask for a lot of money. Tell them to pay you $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 for everybody that lives in the community. They’ll do it. You just got to ask.”

He had proof, sort of. “I saw one case in Louisiana where they were really fighting,” he said, and “the company, I think it was Meta, they agreed to pay everybody $10,000.” Then: “Pay the people.” And: “They have so much money.” That’s his claim about Meta.

What we found in Louisiana was teachers. In Richland Parish, home of Meta’s Hyperion campus, teachers got bonuses of about $50,000. The Next Web, citing the Shreveport Bossier Advocate, traces that to a one-cent parish sales tax from 1968 landing on Meta’s construction spending. Meta’s first payment came to $22.4 million, and the tax stops when the building does. Meta has also announced a $1 billion fund for data center towns, and Business Insider found it comes with no count of people and no timeline, per The Next Web. We couldn’t find any report of Meta paying everybody $10,000.

About two minutes later he checked in with Rick Jackson, the Republican running for governor, who has said local leaders should get a veto over data centers. “Rick’s a little bit tentative on that one,” Trump said, as Jackson looked on, per Atlanta News First. Hard to imagine why. Backstage, Trump told the station he agrees with Jackson on local approval (“I agree with that”), as long as locals get “paid a lot of money.”