Senator Bought 2,000 Acres Around Meta Datacenter He Backed
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- John "Jay" Morris spent two years advancing Meta's Hyperion datacenter — lobbying a utility regulator, cosponsoring two bills enabling the land deal, and voting for two tax-break bills worth an estimated $3.3 billion.
- Morris owns or co-owns 24 properties spanning more than 2,000 acres around Hyperion, including at least three that share a border with the complex, and bought seven more within five miles of the site after Meta's December 2024 announcement.
- Four months after Meta signed its state lease, Morris and his business partners (the Franklin family) paid $1.2 million cash for an 80-acre plot across the street from the project, then converted it into a dirt quarry serving the Meta construction site.
- As recently as February, Morris and his partners sold hundreds of acres to Entergy for a methane-burning power plant intended to supply electricity to the datacenter.
- Ethics experts including former Louisiana Board of Ethics chair La Koshia Roberts and Loyola's Dane Ciolino said Morris's pattern of voting on bills that benefited his land holdings without recusal or disclosure raises serious concerns under state ethics statutes (La RS 42:1112(A), 42:1120, 42:1101).
- Morris denied wrongdoing, telling Floodlight the tax breaks applied to all datacenters — not just Meta — and that Louisiana law did not require him to disclose his financial interest in the legislation.
Why it matters: Louisiana does not require public disclosure of sale prices, so the dollar value of Morris's gains is unknown — but ethics experts say his pattern of authoring and voting on bills that directly benefited his personal land holdings, then never recusing or disclosing the conflict, raises a serious question of possible state ethics-law violations, even as the legislature gave a trillion-dollar company $3.3 billion in tax breaks.
