Rob Cleveland’s phone has been blowing up these last few months. Ever since Meta announced that it would be fast-tracking the construction of a $10 billion AI data center in Richland Parish, nearly 20 other developers have contacted the president and CEO of Grow NELA to talk about potential investments.
The economic development agency, which covers a 10-parish area in northeast Louisiana, had 22 active leads as of early March, an incredible number for the predominantly rural area.
“The words ‘unprecedented’ and ‘transformational’ get thrown around a lot in the economic development space, but I can’t think of any better words to use,” Cleveland said. “It’s utterly remarkable what has happened and what continues to happen.”
In December, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced it would build the mammoth facility on 1,400 acres of state-owned land, a transformational investment that Louisiana Economic Development hopes will cement the state’s status as a major innovation hub and put the rural community on the leading edge of a global digital revolution.
To power the data center—which will span more than a mile long—as well as meet future energy needs, Entergy has proposed constructing three natural gas fired power plants at a cost of $3 billion that could one day be converted to clean energy production.
Cleveland credits a confluence of factors for pushing the mega-project forward with unprecedented speed. “We had the right land, the right owners and the right state leadership,” he says.
“Typically, we’ll pursue projects that are one-tenth this size and work on them for three or four years. The fact that this one—at $10 billion—came together in eight months is just incredible.
“It’s an entirely different level of economic development. I was on a call today with a data center developer from the Midwest. I told him how it all came together so quickly, and he didn’t believe me.”
Achieving Speed to Market
The journey began during Washington Mardi Gras 2024, when Entergy Louisiana approached officials with Louisiana Economic Development about an unnamed developer planning to build a “significant” data center somewhere in the south. The energy provider had been actively marketing the Richland Parish site through its Site Selection Center and Go Entergy platforms, emphasizing its potential for large-scale developments.
Within two weeks LED, Entergy and Gov. Jeff Landry’s office were mapping out a game plan. “Louisiana was ideally positioned for a couple of reasons,” says Susan Bourgeois, LED secretary. “Amazon Web Services had just announced their data center project in Madison, Mississippi, and xAI had announced another in Memphis, so there was already this ‘Digital Delta’ taking shape. And in Richland Parish there’s land, natural resources and accessibility to the grid … so we were well positioned simply because of geography and the fact that Louisiana didn’t have a data center yet.”
Having a development-ready, LED-certified site readily available also went a long way toward meeting Meta’s “speed to market” requirement, an absolute necessity in the ultra-competitive data center space. The state had owned the land for years, having acquired it from a local landowner during the Bobby Jindal administration in hopes of landing an automobile manufacturer.
Nevertheless, there were a few obstacles to overcome before the project could move forward. At the top of the list: Louisiana didn’t offer sales tax rebates on equipment purchases, which is an absolute necessity for a data center operator who must regularly and frequently replace equipment.
“Gov. Landry said if you bring me a project, I’ll call a special session and do what I can to get you a sales tax exemption,” Bourgeois says. “But in the middle of the session, the project quickly started getting legs and we didn’t have the luxury of waiting. So we found a bill moving through the session that could be amended to include the rebate and made it happen.”
It was a recurring theme—each time the project reached an impasse or encountered a regulatory barrier, the cross-functional team would work to find a solution. “We were just pulling triggers,” Bourgeois says. “The entire cabinet was working on it, along with several members of the legislature … all under non-disclosure agreements. It was a ‘whole of government’ approach.”
Workforce development was another critical piece of the puzzle, so Bourgeois asked Dr. Monty Sullivan, president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System, or LCTCS, to contact administrators at Northern Virginia Community College, long been recognized as having “best in class” data center operations curriculum. “Before the project was even announced, Monty and his team were actively developing the curriculum,” she adds.
LCTCS also allocated $250,000 to Delta Community College in Monroe from its Workforce Training Rapid Response Fund so that the college could expand its curriculum and staffing to train the welders, electricians and other skilled laborers needed to build the Meta facility.
“We worked collectively with Delta to ensure we had enough for construction, and eventually for data center operations,” says Chandler LeBoeuf, vice president of education at LCTCS.
LeBoeuf says the experience ultimately strengthened the bond between LCTCS and state officials. “It just wasn’t like this in the past,” he adds. “More typically, we’d be brought in at the last minute, at the end game, then would have to scramble to align resources.
“But this new successful, proven partnership model could continue in perpetuity for any future economic development projects,” he adds. “That’s important, as the relationship between the LCTCS system and the state must be strong in order to maintain open lines of communication and ensure that the colleges in our system are responsive to the needs.”
LED’s FastStart also assisted, primarily as a liaison between the various parties in the workforce development arena. Chelsea Dufrene, FastStart director, says her agency delivered critical workforce data—education pipelines, staffing reports, job postings, occupational snapshots and wage studies aligned with potential Meta needs—to Delta Community College and Bossier Parish Community College to assist in the development of curriculum.
“We continue to collaborate with all of our partners, specifically with LCTCS to maximize their financial commitment to support both the construction workforce needs and eventual operation of the Metadata center,” Dufrene says.
A New Roadmap
Bourgeois revels at the speed at which LED and its partners delivered the Meta project to Louisiana. Their success recently garnered national attention, in fact, when the state agency received Business Facilities Magazine’s 2024 Platinum Deal of the Year Award.
“Even with all of our institutional memory here at LED, no one remembers a deal of this size and scale being done so quickly,” she says. “Typically, when we announce a deal, there’s a lot of paperwork to do after the fact. But not with Meta. When we announced on Dec. 4, every piece of paper had been signed. Everything that needed to happen for dirt to be turned was signed and the ink was dry.”
The “whole of government” approach represents a seismic shift in Louisiana’s economic development strategy, one that Bourgeois plans to replicate on future pursuits. “When all levels of state government, along with local government and private sector partners come together, towing on the rope in the same direction, things can happen and happen very quickly.”
It’s her hope that Meta’s historic investment is just the beginning of a bold strategy to drive economic growth through AI, as well as expand and diversify the state’s tech sector. “The folks at Meta wanted to put their biggest data center in the world in Louisiana, and we made it easy,” she says. “Just think what that does for the business narrative in Louisiana.”
Meanwhile, Grow NELA’s Cleveland is working to capitalize on a data center “gold rush” in his corner of the state. “Companies are attracted to this area’s low tax rates, low regulatory environment and lots of available inexpensive land … and we have folks in state government who are willing to do what they need to do,” he adds. “It’s moving fast, because these data centers all understand that there’s a limited power supply.”
