Louisiana's Data Center Pipeline Passes $78 Billion

Amazon raised its Northwest Louisiana data center investment to $18 billion on August 18, adding a third campus in Shreveport to the Caddo and Bossier Parish sites it committed to in February. The $6 billion increase over the original $12 billion figure pushes announced hyperscale commitments in Louisiana past $78 billion across three operators and four parishes, in a state that had almost no data center construction five years ago.

The other two commitments are larger and further along. Meta's Richland Parish campus, which the company calls its largest data center anywhere, carries a stated Louisiana investment above $50 billion and a design capacity of 5 gigawatts. Hut 8 selected Entergy Louisiana and West Feliciana Parish in December for a project the utility described as up to $10 billion in its first phase, starting at 330 megawatts with room to scale to 1,000 megawatts of utility capacity.

Meta's site is the one already generating payroll. A year into construction, Meta reported 3,700 construction workers supported and $875 million in contracts with Louisiana businesses, 84 percent of it with firms in Northeast Louisiana. The company projected 5,000 workers on site by June 2026 and now publishes a peak figure of more than 7,500 skilled trade workers, naming electricians alongside steel workers, pipefitters, carpenters and fiber technicians. Contracts to Louisiana businesses have since passed $1.6 billion. Mortenson, DPR Construction and Turner Construction are the general contractors hiring against it.

Amazon's numbers are smaller and structured differently. The company projects up to 2,250 construction jobs across the three Northwest Louisiana campuses, up to 750 full-time positions at the completed data centers, and roughly 2,500 additional supported roles. Amazon is building with Southwestern Electric Power Company rather than Entergy, and has committed to pay 100 percent of the cost of the new energy infrastructure and grid upgrades needed to serve the sites. It has also backed solar projects adding up to 200 megawatts to the grid, and pledged up to $400 million toward public water infrastructure. Hut 8's West Feliciana project, targeting operations by the second quarter of 2027, expects about 1,000 workers at peak construction and at least 75 permanent direct jobs.

The utility scope running alongside these campuses is its own body of work. The Louisiana Public Service Commission has authorized Entergy Louisiana to build three combined-cycle combustion turbine plants to serve the Meta load, two in Richland Parish targeted for late 2028 and one at the Waterford site in St. Charles Parish for the end of 2029, plus expedited procurement of up to 1,500 megawatts of solar. Entergy is also constructing a roughly 100-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission project priced near $1.2 billion and slated to be in service by December 2026. That is substation, switchyard and high-voltage terminal work that exists whether or not a single server ships.

For a commercial electrician, the practical difference between this and a conventional Louisiana industrial job is density and repetition. A gigawatt-class campus is medium-voltage feeder and switchgear work, busway runs, UPS and battery rooms, generator paralleling and load bank testing, cable tray at volume, and a commissioning phase that is longer and more documented than most contractors are used to. The sequences repeat building to building, which rewards crews that learn the detail once and produce it consistently. Schedules are set by energization dates, not by weather, and the hiring follows those dates.

The wage math is what makes this a state story rather than a national one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an average hourly wage of $26.24 in the Shreveport-Bossier City metro area for May 2025, against a nationwide average of $33.54. Construction and extraction occupations made up 5.2 percent of local employment there at a mean of $26.07 an hour, compared with 4.1 percent nationally at $31.42. Data center construction does not pay to a local baseline. It pays to a national contractor's schedule risk, which is why campuses of this size in low-wage metros tend to pull workers in rather than staff up entirely from the surrounding parishes.

That gap is the leverage for electricians already in the state. The near-term demand is construction and it is time-limited by definition, but the operational side is not. Meta's Richland Parish site is projected to support 1,000 permanent operational jobs, with electricians listed first among the trades it names. Amazon's 750 full-time positions carry the same structure. Facility electrician work at a hyperscale campus is a different job from construction wiring, closer to maintenance and switching discipline than to installation, and it does not end when the last building is energized.

For contractors, the constraint is the same one showing up in every state with a large campus: qualified crews who can hold a schedule, and journeymen with documented commercial and industrial experience rather than residential background. Louisiana's advantage is that the operators have been transparent about headcount and timing, which is more notice than most markets get.

Four parishes, three operators, and a construction peak north of 10,000 trade workers. The hiring window in Louisiana is open now, and it has a published closing date.