A $12 billion artificial intelligence data center that will create “hundreds” of permanent jobs will be built in West Feliciana Parish, according to Parish President Kenny Hubbard.
“This is life-changing for this area,” Hubbard said. “A rising tide lifts all ships.”
This is the second announcement in the past few weeks that a large AI data center will be built in Louisiana. In late November, Facebook’s parent company Meta unveiled plans to build a massive multibillion-dollar center in north Louisiana. The center will process data for big tech companies and has been touted as an economic development win by Gov. Jeff Landry.
Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bonnet Bourgeois said the state’s available land and power grid capacity make it an attractive location for data centers.
“Data centers are a great example of the convergence of blue-collar industry and technology,” she said in an interview this fall.
LED officials declined to comment on the West Feliciana data center. The department has a long-standing policy of not discussing economic development projects until there is an official announcement.
West Feliciana officials are scheduled to vote on plans for the Hut 8 AI data center at their Jan. 6 meeting.
Hut 8 plans to build a data center on a 611-acre parcel off Route 964 at the south end of the parish, according to documents filed with West Feliciana Parish officials.
The first phase will consist of two 450,000 square foot buildings that will house data servers and create thousands of direct and indirect construction jobs. More than 50 permanent jobs will be created for network and server technicians and maintenance staff. Plans call for the first building to be completed by the end of 2025 and the second by the end of 2026.
Hubbard said future stages could triple the size of the operation and lead to the construction of a power plant to meet the power needs of the operation.
The first phase of the data center will require 300 megawatts of power, according to documents filed with West Feliciana officials. The Nuclear Regulation Authority estimates that this is enough energy to power 54,000 homes in the southern region for a year. Future expansion could increase energy demands up to 1,000 megawatts or more.
St. Francisville’s River Bend station will generate 974 megawatts of power, according to Entergy.
Hut 8 operates Bitcoin mining facilities and data centers in 20 locations across the United States and Canada. The company is named after the building where pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing created the machine that cracked the Enigma code during World War II. This allowed the Allies to intercept messages from the German army, allowing the American and British forces to win the battle.
Talk of a large data center has been swirling in West Feliciana for more than a year. In November 2023, Harvard University announced that the diocese had sold a 107-acre site in an industrial park for $500,000 for a project that would be a major boost to the local economy.
Last month, when parish officials were discussing building a rodeo arena at West Feliciana Athletic Park, Hubbard said he wanted to wait “until the project is completed” before committing to funding.
“I’m finally able to put this feeling behind me,” Hubbard said Monday.
A data center is an airport-sized building containing computer servers and other IT infrastructure that serves as a facility for companies to store, process, and transmit data.
In addition to storage and cloud services, powerful facilities can support things like AI machine learning, social media, large-scale e-commerce purchasing, real-time map services, and even cryptocurrency mining.
Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building these processing hubs in the U.S. and abroad. Data centers are a key part of the AI boom that is rapidly transforming the global technology industry.
Specialized AI data centers, also known as “AI factories,” provide the infrastructure that helps train and provide insights about AI systems and algorithms. This training requires enormous data processing power.
Contributor James Minton contributed to this report
