The Bossier City Municipal Complex in Bossier City, La. Photo: Emilee Calametti / The Center Square
By Darren Svan | The Center Square
The Amazon Web Services’ data center located north of Benton will pay Bossier City around $12 million of revenue each year for water service, according to a Bossier Parish official.
Ken Ward, the Bossier Parish Police Jury administrator, said utility upgrades to Bossier City's aging infrastructure, which Amazon has agreed to fund, could recover enough lost water to avoid increasing withdrawals from the Red River.
“Bossier is going to make so many repairs and upgrades to their system that they will probably never even see a change in their capacity or their use, because they lose that much water in an average day,” Ward said during a presentation. “It's a win-win for Bossier City – they get their problem fixed and they get paid for it.”
Ward was in Shreveport Thursday to discuss water-related topics at the Caddo Parish Commission’s rural development committee meeting.
The city entered into a water services agreement with TXLAAR, a legal entity for the project, to provide water for the massive data center campus that’s expected to begin operations in 2028. STACK Infrastructure is developing the $6 billion project for Amazon.
The center is expected to draw several million gallons per day during peak operations, primarily to support cooling computer servers. The project will pay to develop new water infrastructure and also upgrade existing city systems, according to Ward.
Commissioner Greg Young asked Ward to speak about the amount of water they expect to extract from the river.
Caddo and Bossier negotiated favorable agreements that will help improve water systems that each lose roughly 25% of their treated water annually, Ward said.
“They're gonna tighten up all their little problems and that water loss that they're gonna gain alone will pretty much serve on a day-to-day basis the one in Bossier,” he said. “The only times that it won't is late August and September, when the temperatures are really getting high and they're not going to have some of that ambient cooling.”
Ward expects the upgrades to be done before the first of six buildings is completed in 2028. Each will be about 218,000 square feet, or about the size of four football fields.
“The water's got to be there doing the cooling,” he said.