NEW ORLEANS – When Meta announced a $10B plan to build its largest data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, it largely overshadowed the unofficial news that Hut 8 is planning to build a $2.5B data center on 107 acres in the southeast corner of West Feliciana Parish off Louisiana Highway 964. While there is no official statement yet, reports say that the data center’s future tenants will be investing an additional $10 billion in computers and equipment to operationalize the data center.
Hut 8, headquartered in Miami, Florida, is currently comprised of nineteen sites providing infrastructure and solutions for global technology ecosystems. It is also one of the country’s largest Bitcoin mining companies and delivers cloud, colocation, and computing services to enterprise customers.
According to Data Center Map, Louisiana already has thirteen data centers, ten of which are in southeast Louisiana. With the addition of the Hub 8 and Meta data centers, Louisiana will have a dozen. This might seem like a large number, but to put it into perspective, Virginia – Northern Virginia in particular – boasts more than 250 data centers and is considered the data center capital of the world.
By their very nature, data centers take up a lot of space and the Hut 8 project is no exception, with the first phase of the project reported to include the construction of two 450,000-square-foot buildings. Additional buildings will be constructed after this initial phase, bringing the entire project to completion by 2026, four years earlier than the timeframe for the Meta facility in Richland Parish.
In addition, according to statements made by Kenny Havard, West Feliciana Parish President, the Hut 8 project is estimated to create 1,500 to 2,000 jobs during the construction of the facility with several hundred permanent technical, administrative, and management jobs expected for the ongoing operation of the data center.
With its proximity to the River Bend Station, Entergy’s nuclear power plant near St. Francisville, Hut 8 will have access to excess energy generated by this lower carbon emissions source.
A formal announcement is expected on Jan. 6, when a West Feliciana Parish Planning and Zoning Commission meeting will vote on whether to approve the project.
Hut 8 is named after the building at Bletchley Park where Alan Turing created the Bombe, a machine that could quickly crack the Enigma code and intercept enemy communications during World War II.
