River Bend AI Mega-Campus | High-Density AI Training & Cloud Facility

Status: Announced / Under Development   |   Location: River Bend, Louisiana, USA

Project Overview

On December 17, 2025, Hut 8 Corp. announced a definitive agreement to develop one of the world's largest AI-specific data center clusters at its River Bend campus in Louisiana, USA. This $7 billion (base lease value) project is a strategic response to the extreme compute demands of frontier AI models. The deal is unique in its structure: Hut 8 provides the power and physical infrastructure, Fluidstack operates the high-performance clusters, and Anthropic serves as the primary tenant for its massive AI training needs. Notably, Google is providing a financial backstop for the 15-year lease, highlighting the intercorporate synergy required to fund gigawatt-scale infrastructure.

The project is designed to solve the primary bottleneck in modern AI: power availability. The "River Bend" site leverages a direct partnership with Entergy to deliver an initial 245 MW of IT capacity, with a roadmap to scale up to a staggering 2.29 GW (2,295 MW) of utility capacity. This makes it a "gigawatt-scale" project, rare even in the hyperscale market.

To support the heat density of Anthropic’s next-generation workloads, the facility is being "built with" high-density liquid cooling and custom-designed racks from Vertiv. The construction is being managed by Jacobs, ensuring an institutional-grade delivery. This project represents a shift in the industry toward "power-first" development, where data centers are built around the most robust energy nodes rather than traditional fiber hubs. The full buildout is expected to be a multi-year effort, solidifying the region as a primary "AI backbone" for North America.

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