Amazon To Spend $12B Building Louisiana Data Centers

Another Big Tech firm is bringing a multibillion-dollar data center project to northern Louisiana. 

Amazon plans to spend $12B on a series of data centers near Shreveport in northwestern Louisiana, it announced Monday. It said the investment will include upgrades to the region’s electrical grid as politicians increasingly seek to shield constituents from elevated utility prices related to the artificial intelligence data center boom. 

The projects are expected to create 540 full-time jobs and 1,710 temporary construction positions.

“Investments of this magnitude put Louisiana at the center of operations relied on across the country and connect our communities to jobs that power how Americans live, work and do business,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in a statement. 

Amazon’s $12B investment in the state came with a commitment to cover all expenses for any upgraded energy infrastructure so the costs aren’t passed along to smaller customers.

Any work on the grid required for the project will be done under the oversight of the Louisiana Public Service Commission, according to a release from utility provider Southwestern Electric Power Co., which celebrated the investment.

The tech giant has said it plans to spend $200B this year on scaling up its digital infrastructure Amazon Web Services division amid rapidly expanding demand from AI users.

In northern Louisiana’s Richland Parish, Meta last year formed a $27B joint venture with Blue Owl Capital to build a data center megacampus. The Facebook and Instagram parent company has earmarked up to $135B for AI-related capital expenditures this year.

These massive investments come as President Donald Trump is reportedly pushing Big Tech firms — also including Microsoft and Google parent company Alphabet — to shoulder expenses related to data center grid upgrades. Bloomberg reported Monday that the White House is pushing these companies to sign nonbinding commitments that they would pay for the power and other infrastructure needed to support their data center use. 

The president is expected to discuss the initiative during his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

While the president has boosted AI data center construction, the industry has become increasingly controversial in battleground boom states like Pennsylvania.