ST. FRANCISVILLE — West Feliciana Parish will soon be home to a $12 billion artificial intelligence data center that will bring in thousands of new jobs, Parish President Kenny Havard told WBRZ on Monday. It will be built off of Hwy LA-964. 

News of Hut 8's development in West Feliciana comes just days after Gov. Jeff Landry announced a Meta AI data center.

"This gives West Feliciana a real opportunity to get ahead of the game and do some really smart planned growth that's going to continue to allow West Feliciana to be boutique and do very well at it," he said.

Havard said that Hut 8, a company that operates 20 Bitcoin mining facilities and data centers across North America, hopes to see the first phase of the project complete by the end of 2025. Phase one will include the construction of two 450,000 square foot buildings. He added that the first phase of the project will employ 1,500 to 2,000 construction workers and will bring several hundred more jobs to West Feliciana Parish.

"They'll be several hundred other permanent jobs, very high end. Anything that you see in a plant, you're going to see here, office spaces, and of course tax dollars. There's going to be instrumentation jobs, electrical jobs, there's going to be welders, pipefitters anything you could think of," he said.

The project is privately funded. Parish officials will vote on the rezoning of the project Jan. 6.