Colocation and crypto data center firm Hut 8 has secured 592 acres of land in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, for the construction of a $2.5 billion data center dedicated to Bitcoin mining and AI workloads.

Dubbed the ‘River Bend Campus,’ the site is expected to provide between 1,500 and 2,000 construction jobs and will house up to 300MW of power while being cooled by a closed-loop cooling system.

“We made significant progress in February across every layer of our platform, from expanding our footprint to developing digital infrastructure and upgrading our ASIC fleet,” said Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, in the firm’s Q4 operations update.

“In our power layer, we secured 592 acres in Louisiana for our newest River Bend campus. The site is expected to support a 300-megawatt utility-scale power asset with 200 megawatts of dedicated IT load."

Reports that Hut 8 was looking to develop in the area, located just outside Baton Rouge, surfaced at the end of last year. The company got the green light from local officials for a data center project in January.

Previous reports suggest the project will feature two 450,000 sq ft (41,800 sqm) facilities in the first phase, with construction set to be completed by Q4 2025. The second phase will see additional data centers constructed by the end of 2026.

Hut 8 currently has 19 data center sites either in operation or in development, including ten Bitcoin mining projects, five high-performance computing data centers, and four power-generation assets.

Its 205MW ‘Vega’ site is set to launch later this year. Located in the Texas Panhandle, Vega will feature a custom rack-based, direct-to-chip liquid-cooling system designed for Bitmain’s ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) miners.

In Q4 of 2024, Hut 8 entered into a working partnership with Bitmain to secure ~15 EHps of dedicated Bitcoin mining capacity through the hardware company’s new U3S21EXPH mining rigs, which are set for deployment at the Vega site.

“Our Vega development remains on schedule for Q2 energization. Miner deliveries for our ~15 EHps ASIC Colocation agreement with BITMAIN are underway, and as we prepare for energization,” said Genoot.

In December 2024, Hut 8 initiated a controlled equity offering SM sales agreement to secure funding for the expansion of its data centers. In June 2024, Hut 8 secured a $150 million investment from a fund managed by Coatue Management, LLC., to expand its AI-specific operations.