ST. FRANCISVILLE — Southeast Louisiana is set to become home to a multi-billion-dollar artificial intelligence data center. Hut 8 announced a 15-year, $7 billion lease to build a high-performance AI data center campus in West Feliciana Parish.
It’s a deal that’s been years in the making. “For a couple years now, we’ve been working on trying to land the data center,” West Feliciana Parish President Kenny Havard said. “It’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of people have put in a lot of long hours try to get this thing to fruition. And it looks like the time’s finally come. And we’re quite proud of it. We’re excited about it.”
Havard said people in the parish have had a positive reaction to the news.
“The residents have been excited about it. We’ve been talking about it for years. It’s been on and off discussions at council meetings, trying to get permitting, and getting to a point where they could do their commercial deal,” Havard said.
The commercial deal Havard is referring to involves Hut 8’s new partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack, also announced today. The whole project has a big name backing it.
“Google is backing the project, securing it. Who else would you want, right?,” he said.
Facility plans
Havard described the company as one that hosts racks of computers that do high computing for artificial intelligence.
“The first phase is a 600,000 square foot building, roughly with about $7 billion worth of equipment in it,” Havard explained. “The building itself is probably $2.5 to $3 billion. The equipment is just what they call racks or rows of computers.”
The computers are kept cool by water and air conditioning, but Havard said the new building won’t put a strain on the parish.
“This is a state of the art design that’s not going to require any water use. It’s just a recycle system,” he said. “So the only water that they’re going to be using is the water for washing hands and flushing toilets on a day to day basis. It runs like radiator, so we won’t be having water wells and water issues and stuff like they’ve had in other parts of the country.”
Economic bump
The new project will bring hundreds of jobs to the region, beginning next year when construction is slated to start.
“It’s 1,500 jobs construction jobs to build it,” Havard said. “And it’s going to be 100 or so full time equivalent jobs when it’s built out.”
Havard said once you start hearing about jobs you’re interested in, to reach out those contractors. “We want to tap everybody into the job market who wants to go to work. We want them to go to work because a rising tide lifts all boats.
“The tax package that was negotiated in West Feliciana, we were estimating $90 million more a year in tax revenue for West Feliciana,” Havard said. “We have a great quality of life, and that’s something that we thought was an advantage to us, and that people would pay to be here. People like CEOs make decisions based off of quality of life issues. Is their family going to be safe at home when they’re not at home? All of those things play into people’s decisions.”
So, yes, it is a benefit for us, but it’s also a benefit for this state and and just the whole entire region. It’s going to be a game changer, we hope, for the entire region.”
Timeline
Havard said construction on the project is set to start in mid-January 2026, and he’s being told the building will be fully commercialized by the end of 2027.
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