A $12 billion artificial intelligence data center that will create “several hundred” permanent jobs is coming to West Feliciana Parish, according to Parish President Kenny Havard.
“This is life-changing for the region,” Havard said. “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
West Feliciana officials are set to vote on plans for the Hut 8 AI data center at their Jan. 6 meeting.
According to documents being circulated in West Feliciana, Hut 8 plans to build the data center on a 611-acre parcel off La. Highway 964 on the southern end of the parish. The first phase would consist of two 450,000- square-foot buildings that would house data servers and create thousands of direct and indirect construction jobs. More than 50 permanent jobs would be created for network and server technicians and maintenance staff. Plans are to complete the first building by the end of 2025 and the second before the end of 2026.
Future phases could triple the size of the operations and could lead to the construction of a power plant to meet the utility needs of the operation, Havard said.
Hut 8 operates Bitcoin mining facilities and data centers at 20 sites across the U.S. and Canada. The company is named after the building where pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing created the machines that cracked the Enigma code during World War II. This enabled the Allies to intercept messages from the Germans and caused U.S. and British forces to win battles.
Talk of a large scale data center has been swirling around West Feliciana for more than a year. In November 2023, Havard announced the parish had sold 107-acre site in its industrial park for $500,000 for a business that would be a tremendous boost for the local economy.
Last month, while parish officials were discussing building a rodeo arena in the West Feliciana sports park, Havard said he wanted to wait “until the project comes through” before committing to funding.
“I can finally get this off my chest,” he said.
Data centers are airport-sized buildings filled with computer servers and other IT infrastructure that serve as a facility for companies to store, process and send out data.
In addition to storage and cloud services, the powerful facilities can support things like AI machine learning, social media, large eCommerce purchases, real-time map services and even cryptocurrency mining.
Companies like Meta, Amazon and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to construct these processing hubs across the U.S. and overseas. Data centers are a critical part of the AI boom that is rapidly transforming the global tech industry.
Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it would spend $10 billion to build a data center in northeast Louisiana.
Specialized AI data centers, sometimes called “AI factories,” provide the infrastructure to help train AI systems and algorithms and deliver insights on them. This training requires huge amounts of data processing power.
Contributing Writer James Minton contributed to this report