West Feliciana Parish is set to receive a $10 million advance on Hut 8’s future PILOT payments, putting money in the hands of local agencies about a year before annual payments are scheduled to begin. Hut 8 is currently developing a multibillion-dollar data center campus near St. Francisville.
At a special meeting Monday evening, West Feliciana’s council and Industrial Development Board approved a cooperative endeavor agreement authorizing the advance on Hut 8’s payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOT payments. Under PILOT agreements, developers make annual payments to local governments instead of paying the full property taxes they would otherwise owe. Amazon and Meta have also struck PILOT agreements for their own Louisiana data center projects.
Hut 8 is expected to make the $10 million payment July 1. Of that amount, $5.3 million will go to the school board, $3.9 million to the parish government and $800,000 to the sheriff’s office.
The parish will reimburse Hut 8 without interest from the first regular PILOT payment, which is due July 1, 2027.
“We pay that $10 million back to them, no interest, when we get our first check,” Parish President Kenny Havard tells Daily Report.
Havard expects the first regular payment to total roughly $60 million. Once the first phase of the data center is fully built out—a milestone expected to be hit by the end of 2027—the annual payment could approach $90 million.
The PILOT payments will be calculated based on the assessed value of Hut 8’s facility and the graphics processing units, or GPUs, housed inside it. That means payments are likely to continue rising as Hut 8 adds more GPUs during future phases of development.
The parish plans to use its $3.9 million share of the $10 million advance primarily on road improvements, though it will also be giving pay raises to all parish employees and performing some water infrastructure work.
“The parish itself is going to work on infrastructure—roads and water,” Havard says. “Those are our two major issues. We might do a few other things, but it’s going to be roads and water. Mostly roads.”
Some rural parish roads are only about 17 feet wide. Certain roads will be widened by several feet, and bicycle or pedestrian lanes will be added where practical.
Havard stresses that the work will not come at the expense of the tree canopy that characterizes many of the parish’s roads.
“We love the canopy over the roads where people ride bikes and all that stuff,” he says. “We want that. We’re not cutting the trees down. It’s not going to look like Siegen Lane when we finish.”
The school board’s $5.3 million share will be directed toward pay raises for teachers and other employees. The sheriff’s office will use its $800,000 allocation on pay raises, as well.
Separately, Hut 8 is funding about $16 million in water system improvements, including a dedicated line to the data center. Combined with the PILOT advance, Havard says Hut 8 has committed roughly $26 million upfront to the parish and its public agencies.
Construction of Hut 8’s data center campus, called River Bend, is accelerating. Some 300 workers are currently on-site, and employment is expected to climb to about 1,200 as construction reaches full scale.
River Bend’s initial development will provide 245 megawatts of critical IT capacity, supported by 330 megawatts from Entergy. Hut 8 has signed a 15-year lease with AI cloud provider Fluidstack valued at $7 billion over its base term; Google is providing a financial backstop for the lease obligations. Fluidstack’s computing infrastructure will support Anthropic’s AI models.
