Roberts: Central LA hopes data center will help economy | Faimon Roberts

ALEXANDRIA — Roaming among tables in an expansive event room on a converted Air Force base earlier this month, Chris Masingill was certain of one thing.

“We will get our opportunity for a data center,” he said with conviction of a revivalist preacher. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Masingill’s enthusiasm for the region has been on display a number of times in the last three months, as the newly minted economic development leader for a 10-parish region across the state’s middle embarked on a tour that was part pep-talk, part community relations and part listening tour.

His message has been simple: Yes, Central Louisiana has been an economic laggard. But a turnaround is possible if the region unites behind a single vision.

Part of his message involves touting the region’s broad potential, but right now, he knows there are two magic words that folks want to hear: data center.

The recent rush across the south to build sprawling new server farms to feed the ravenous AI beast has set off a silicon-rush of sorts, with each state and region competing to make itself the most attractive to massive technology development firms.

The hope, of course, is to land a project like what is coming to Richland Parish, where a subsidiary of Meta is building a $27 billion data center. That project, in the less than two years since its announcement, has already transformed a sleepy agricultural parish into a hub of construction and economic activity.

Central Louisiana’s leaders hunger for that sort of project.

But the economics of such projects are changing. The really big companies, like Meta or Google or Amazon, are not building as many of their own data centers like the one in Richland Parish, Masingill told me.

Instead, it’s smaller companies purchasing land, building the centers and then offering them up to the bigger companies on a contract basis, he said. That’s what appears to be happening in West Feliciana Parish, where a company called Hut 8 is building a $7 billion data center.

Hut 8 recently announced a 15-year deal with Anthropic, the company behind popular AI chatbot Claude.

Central Louisiana’s turn may be coming sooner than some thought. Last month, a company named Applied Digital purchased about 670 acres near Boyce in Rapides Parish. Applied Digital is a Dallas-based firm that describes itself as “constructing the epicenter of AI” on its website.

Masingill alluded to the news in his talk to those business leaders. “You all saw the news with the land transaction, that’s no secret,” he said.

Masingill told me that Central Louisiana has plenty of the things that data center developers are looking for: available land, water and power generation potential. So, even if this project doesn’t pan out, one eventually will.

Plenty of folks in CenLa hope he’s right.