The complete guide to Louisiana AI data centers in 2026

Why Louisiana is suddenly the largest AI data-center market in the South

Between late 2024 and early 2026, four hyperscale-class AI data center developments were announced across Louisiana, totaling north of $25 billion in committed capital expenditure and more than 4 gigawatts of projected compute load. That number is not a forecast or an analyst estimate — it is the aggregate of project-level filings with Louisiana Economic Development, Louisiana Public Service Commission dockets, Entergy generation plans, and SEC filings by the publicly traded operators involved.

Three structural facts explain the shift. First, Louisiana power is cheap by national standards: industrial average retail rates in 2024 sat under 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly half of California and Massachusetts and a third of New York. Hyperscale economics are dominated by the cost of electricity over a 15-to-20-year operating window; a 2-gigawatt campus running 24/7 consumes on the order of $1 billion in power per year at Louisiana rates and almost double that on the coasts.

Second, the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP) — an 80% exemption from local ad-valorem property taxes for up to 10 years, expanded in 2024 by Act 730 — is one of the most aggressive subsidies any U.S. state offers for industrial capex. For a $10 billion campus, ITEP can be worth more than a billion dollars in present value over the life of the exemption.

Third, Louisiana has unused gas-fired generation capacity, an under-deployed transmission grid in the central and northern parishes, and a regulated utility (Entergy Louisiana) that has both the political relationship with the Louisiana Public Service Commission and the corporate ability to file multi-plant generation expansions on tight timelines. None of the other states that bid on Hyperion or AWS could match all three.

The four announced campuses

Treat the list below as the running denominator for every conversation about Louisiana AI. Each project is a separate buildout, with its own parish, utility-serving filing, incentive package, and risk profile. We maintain the project-level source citations on the canonical project pages.

• Meta Hyperion AI Data Center — Richland Parish — Meta's largest-ever data center, projected at ~4 million square feet across thousands of acres, designed for AI training and inference workloads at approximately 2 GW total. Capex range $10B–$27B+. Triggered Entergy's filing to build three new natural-gas combined-cycle plants. Canonical source page: /data-centers/meta-hyperion.
• Amazon AWS Louisiana data center campuses — Caddo & Bossier parishes — $12B multi-campus development, three interconnected sites in northwest Louisiana, designed for both cloud and AI workloads. Co-developed with STACK Infrastructure. Canonical: /data-centers/amazon-ai-data-center-campuses.
• Hut 8 River Bend AI Data Center — Calcasieu Parish — Hut 8's pivot from cryptocurrency mining to AI infrastructure produced a multi-hundred-megawatt campus along the Calcasieu River corridor. Canonical: /data-centers/hut-8-river-bend-ai-data-center-campus.
• Applied Digital Project Lightning — central Louisiana — AI/HPC campus from a public company already operating in North Dakota; Louisiana site brings the company into Entergy-served territory for the first time. Canonical: /data-centers/applied-digital-project-lightning.

The power stack

The hardest question in Louisiana hyperscale is not where the buildings go — it's where the electrons come from. Hyperion alone requires capacity comparable to the entire residential load of Baton Rouge.

Entergy Louisiana's response was filed at LPSC in 2024–2025: three new natural-gas combined-cycle (CCGT) plants, with retirement deferrals on legacy units and a transmission upgrade plan to move power from generation to load. The plants are expected to total roughly 2,500 MW of new nameplate capacity. The filings include cost-allocation language that consumer advocates have contested: who pays for the new generation, the data-center customer or all of Entergy's existing ratepayers? The LPSC's eventual order on cost allocation will be one of the most consequential utility decisions in Louisiana's regulatory history.

Solar and wind, despite advocacy from environmental groups, are unlikely to be the marginal supply for hyperscale load in 2026–2028 in Louisiana. The state's solar resource is moderate, transmission build-out for utility-scale renewables is slow, and AI customers care about 24/7 firmness — they will not sign PPAs for intermittent supply without a firmness contract behind it.

The water stack

Liquid-cooled AI training runs hot. A 2 GW campus consumes meaningful amounts of water — both for evaporative cooling and for closed-loop cooling-tower makeup — measured in millions of gallons per day. Louisiana has water (a lot of it, in the rivers and the aquifer), but the operational permits to use that water at industrial scale are subject to state environmental review.

Hyperion's water plan, per the LED announcement, leans on a combination of municipal supply and on-site reuse. Amazon's Caddo/Bossier project will draw from the Red River corridor. Each project's permit trail can be tracked through the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) database. Where applicable, the canonical project page links the specific permit numbers.

The incentive stack

Three programs combine to make Louisiana competitive with Virginia and Texas:

• ITEP (Industrial Tax Exemption Program) — 80% exemption on local ad valorem property tax for new industrial capex, two 5-year terms. Approval requires Local Board (school board, parish council, sheriff's office) sign-off following Act 730 changes.
• Quality Jobs Program (QJP) — payroll rebates for net new full-time jobs above a wage threshold; tiers at 4% and 6% of payroll.
• FastStart — Louisiana Economic Development's workforce training arm. Free, customized training programs for new employer build-outs. Data centers receive multi-million-dollar in-kind training packages.

The workforce pipeline

Construction phase peaks for these campuses run 18 to 36 months and create thousands of trades jobs — electricians, mechanical contractors, structural steel, concrete, fiber optic, security infrastructure. Operating phase headcount is much smaller (typically 150–400 FTE per gigawatt of capacity), but the operating jobs are higher-wage and longer-duration.

The Louisiana Community & Technical College System (LCTCS), particularly Northwest Louisiana Technical Community College and BPCC, has begun standing up data-center technician credentials. FastStart-sponsored programs accelerate that pipeline for each individual campus.

The unresolved political fights

Three open fights will shape 2026–2028:

• Cost allocation at LPSC — who pays for the new generation Entergy is building to serve Hyperion: data-center customers (special tariff) or all ratepayers (socialized).
• Local ITEP approvals under Act 730 — each new campus must clear local board votes. Some parishes (with thin tax bases and significant Meta/Amazon capex) may welcome the exemption; others (with stronger fiscal positions) may push for higher local contributions.
• Environmental and water-permit challenges — LDEQ permitting can become a venue for environmental groups to slow projects.

What to watch

The next 12 months of Louisiana AI infrastructure can be tracked through five public data streams, all surfaced in our live monitor:

• SEC EDGAR filings — 8-K, 10-Q, 10-K from Meta, Amazon, Hut 8, Applied Digital with Louisiana mentions.
• LPSC docket additions and orders — particularly Entergy-related dockets and any new petitions.
• Louisiana Economic Development announcements at opportunitylouisiana.gov.
• Parish permit and council agenda items.
• Local-press coverage in Monroe, Shreveport-Bossier, Lake Charles, and Alexandria.

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