An AI data center development planned by Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, has been approved.

Parish officials voted unanimously for the build on January 6, 2025.

Located just outside Baton Rouge, Hut 8 was named as the company behind the 107-acre development at the end of last year.

In the meeting, Riley Trettel, senior vice president at Hut 8, cited the region’s gas pipelines, transmission infrastructure, and fiber optic connectivity as being sufficient for its potential anchor client.

The firm is set to invest up to $2.5 billion in the project, while future tenants are expected to invest an additional $10 billion in the IT equipment for the site.

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.

Trettel added that Hut 8 plans on building an on-site substation and that the facility will use a closed-loop cooling system.

It is expected to require 300MW of power and will provide around 1,500 to 2,000 construction jobs.

DCD reported that Hut 8 has a current market cap of $2.6 billion and would likely need further investment or a partner for the project.

Rumors of Meta joining the project have been rife since the plans first surfaced in November last year. Meta is developing its own gigawatt-scale campus elsewhere in Louisiana.

In December last year, Hut 8 entered a Controlled Equity Offering SM Sales Agreement to raise capital for data center expansion.

In June 2024, Hut 8 raised $150 million in investment from a fund managed by Coatue Management, LLC., to help the company with its goal of serving AI customers. The following month, the company announced it was expanding its operations in Texas and had signed a power purchase agreement to procure 205MW of energy for a new data center.

Based in Florida, the company has an existing portfolio of 19 sites: ten Bitcoin sites in Alberta, New York, and Texas; five high-performance computing data centers in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada; and four power generation assets in Ontario. It acquired five colo data centers in Canada from TeraGo in 2022.

West Feliciana Parish is located around 35 miles north of Baton Rouge. DartPoints is another company with data centers in Baton Rouge.