Applied Digital's $7.2 billion AI campus faces a Nov. 19 Louisiana vote on a $575.5 million tax deal

Rapides Parish is showing what a community can extract from an AI buildout. On November 19 the England Authority, the public board that runs England Airpark, a former air base in central Louisiana, votes on a tax agreement for Delta Forge 1, Applied Digital's▼−8.14% — Applied Digital, down 8.14 percent today $7.2 billion, 300-megawatt campus ¹. The agreement was introduced unanimously on November 9, and its decisive clause is a date: local taxing bodies start collecting the moment it is signed, before the data center exists ¹.

The parish gets paid before the building exists

The Payment In Lieu Of Taxes, or PILOT, agreement↗ sends Rapides Parish taxing bodies $13.8 million in each of 2026 and 2027, rising to $575.5 million through 2052 ¹. It sets a floor of 75 jobs by 2028 paying about $91,000, one and a half times Louisiana's average wage, growing to 200 jobs by 2031, with a formula that raises Applied Digital's payments whenever hiring falls short ¹.

Road repairs, insurance make-wholes and a $50 million community trust are written into the text ¹. The chamber and the sheriff's finance officer spoke for it; one activist called the technology "completely unregulated and extremely dangerous" ¹. A red-lined draft adding water-use protections is due before the vote ¹.

The rent that justifies all of this has not started

The tenant, which Applied Digital names only as a tier-one investment-grade hyperscaler and which reporting identifies as Meta▲+2.23% — Meta, up 2.23 percent today Platforms, signed a 15-year take-or-pay lease worth about $7.5 billion in April↗ ²³⁴. Take-or-pay obliges the tenant to pay for the space whether or not it uses it, once the buildings are delivered. Until then the construction bills belong to Applied Digital, and last quarter showed what that costs: the company collected $65.8 million of base rent ⁴. Its interest bill was $77.4 million ⁴, a crossing point we flagged on November 3. Most of the quarter's revenue was one-time fit-out work, not rent ⁴.

The vote unblocks the campus's next financing

The same November 9 packet that carried the tax terms also proposes up to $4.6 billion of Louisiana revenue bonds↗ for Delta Forge 1, repaid from the tenant's rent rather than the builder's credit, with no rate set yet ². That structure matters: lenders would be pricing Meta's balance sheet rather than a company whose debt now exceeds its market value ²⁵.

Chief Executive Wes Cummins said on November 2 that the company still needs financing for roughly 800 megawatts over the next twelve months ⁶. About $36 billion of contracted revenue across five campuses is waiting on buildings that do not exist yet ⁴.

Shareholders carry the years between signing and rent

Everything upstream of the money is signed: demand is real, land is secured, taxes are fixed, the lease exists. What remains is the unglamorous work of turning signed paper into delivered megawatts, and someone always finances those years. Macquarie's preferred equity and the project bondholders rank ahead of the common stock ⁷, as we laid out on October 23, and the common stock is the paper that has halved since mid-February↗ ⁵. The two numbers that decide whether that bet pays are the rate the Louisiana bonds finally print ², and whether base rent passes interest when the company reports in January ⁵.

The parish gets paid from signature, the tenant pays at delivery, and the shareholder carries everything in between.