Editorial by Bill Robertson
Critics of a proposed Amazon data center in west Shreveport gathered three blocks from the site Thursday for a two-hour critique of this expanding industry spreading across Louisiana, Texas and other states.
Billed as a public meeting on “the Truth About Data Centers,” the gathering was organized by City Council candidate Derrick Henderson and hosted by Greenwood Acres Full Gospel Baptist Church on Greenwood Road.
Amazon Web Services plans three large data centers in the Shreveport metropolitan area. The projects were recruited by the state Department of Economic Development and announced here with fanfare by Gov. Jeff Landry and local elected officials in February.
The locations are an industrial park on Resilient Way west of Pines Road, a site on the Louisiana-Texas border near Caddo Lake, and a third place in north Bossier Parish.
The two rural locations are under construction. The Resilient Way site is tied up in a lawsuit by the Sierra Club Louisiana chapter challenging the City Council’s unanimous approval of the project in December 2025.
Greenwood Acres Pastor Reginald Dodd described the planned Resilient Way center, next to a SWEPCO transmission facility, as 400,000 square feet and 69 feet tall.
“Everything to the east of here will be blocked by buildings,” Dodd said.
Dodd said nearby residents were “hardly notified” before Shreveport officials gave their approval.
Lead speaker Thursday was community organizer K.D. Minor of New Orleans. She characterized the Amazon projects as part of a national push by technology companies to build “hyper-scale” data centers to power “generative AI.”
Google defines Generative AI as “artificial intelligence that creates new content—like text, images, audio, video or code. It works by learning patterns from massive amounts of training data and predicting what piece of data should come next when given a user prompt.”
Minor said this new generation of data centers are “the hungriest, thirstiest and fastest-growing” technology developments today. She said these facilities would consume more water, electricity, land and resources than earlier data centers.
Data processed in these facilities will serve artificial intelligence, crypto mining, cloud storage and other uses, Minor said.
“There are 5,500 data centers in the United States,” she said. “The new hyper-scalers we are seeing proposed today are bigger than you can imagine.”
(East Ascension Telephone, operating as EATEL, opened a data center in the former Selber Brothers department store downtown in 2016. The facility costing $20 million was supported with state subsidy.)
Minor said plans for the Meta “Hyperion” project in Richland Parish, east of Monroe, have expanded to a building footprint roughly the size of the island of Manhattan, New York City. Meta, owner of Facebook, is said to be spending $50 billion on the development.
Entergy, Louisiana’s largest power company, is leading the Meta project. Entergy received Louisiana Public Service Commission approval last August to power Meta with three new electricity plants running on natural gas.
At the time, the Meta decision by the LPSC was called its largest ever for a single industry.
Entergy later expanded its request to add 7 additional gas plants for a total of 10, supplemented by solar farms and battery storage. That growth
decision is pending at the LPSC in December.
Minor encouraged audience members who believe the Amazon projects in Shreveport-Bossier cannot be stopped. She said opposition has halted $130 billion in data-center development across the country.
Northwest Louisiana is served by SWEPCO, but Minor said the Meta project could affect SWEPCO power bills by hiking demand for natural gas used to generate electricity.
Minor tied the development of data centers in Louisiana to plans by Landry to grow the nuclear industry here. Landry has volunteered Louisiana for a Trump Administration plan to revive nuclear power. Landry’s plan, announced last month, calls for university research in the Baton Rouge area, construction of small reactors in northwest Louisiana and disposal of nuclear waste in Gulf of Mexico salt domes.
Speaker Nathaniel Manning focused on the economics of data centers. “You’re going to have tradeoffs, winners and losers,” Manning said. The projects will enjoy decades of taxpayer subsidy, consume large amounts of water and land, and require few permanent workers, he said. Manning said a Fort Worth data center costing $1.2 billion is
employing 37 people.
Echoing Dodd’s criticism of little advanced notice given by public officials, Manning said, “You can’t ask neighbors to trust a decision they were locked out of.
“The lack of transparency here leaves the community thinking that something was done to them, not for them,” he said.
Former state legislator Ernest Baylor said critics in Shreveport should take note of the recent move by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to halt development of new data centers in Texas.
“He stopped 1,800 data centers” with that move, Baylor said.
Baylor said Shreveport citizens should use the upcoming November elections to voice their concerns. Candidates are running for hundreds of positions in Louisiana government, from United States Senator to justice of the peace and constable.
John came to Shreveport in January of 1977 when he was transferred to Barksdale AFB.
He’s been active in Shreveport politics since deciding to make Shreveport his home.
John practiced law for 40 years and he now monitors local politics. He regularly attends Shreveport City Council and Caddo Parish Commission meetings.
John is published weekly in The Inquisitor, bi-monthly in The Forum News, and frequently in the Shreveport Times.
He enjoys addressing civic groups on local government issues and elections.