The parish Planning & Zoning Commission easily voted in favor of the Hut 8 artificial intelligence data center. Parish President Kenny Havard said the center will create "several hundred" permanent jobs.
Riley Trettel, senior vice president of data center development for Hut 8, said the plan is to lease the center to an undisclosed tenant, which will then buy computers and equipment. Trettel said Hut 8 serves as a developer for technology companies that need more computer infrastructure than they can build.
The tenants of the data center will purchase $10 billion worth of computers and equipment, Havard said.
Hut 8 plans to build the data center on a 611-acre parcel off La. 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 the year and the second before the end of 2026.
"We have an aggressive timeline to build," Trettel said. "We plan to get started as expeditiously as we can."
Louisiana is a target market for Hut 8, Trettel said. There's a strong fiberoptic infrastructure along Interstate 10 and the property is close to River Bend. The site the company plans to build on is high above the 500 year flood plain and there's a robust work force.
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 Parish for more than a year. In November 2023, Havard announced the parish had sold the 107-acre site in its industrial park for $500,000 for a business that would be a tremendous boost for the local economy.
According to the documents submitted with West Feliciana officials, the first phases of the data center would require 300 megawatts of power. That's enough energy to power 54,000 Southern homes for a year, according to estimates from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Future expansions could take the energy demands up to and beyond 1,000 megawatts.
The River Bend Station in St. Francisville generates 974 megawatts of power, according to Entergy.
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 e-commerce 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.
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.
This is the second announcement of a large AI data center coming to Louisiana in less than two months. In late November, Facebook parent company Meta revealed plans to build a massive, multibillion-dollar center in north Louisiana that will process data for the tech behemoth and is being touted as a win for economic development by Gov. Jeff Landry.
Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bonnett Bourgeois has said the amount of available land and power grid capacity make the state an attractive location for data centers.
"Data centers are a great example of a blend between a blue-collar industry and tech," she said in an interview this fall.
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