Louisiana Is Beating Texas at Its Own Game… This Time

For decades, Louisiana has looked west and asked the same frustrating question: Why can’t we be more like Texas?

Texas gets the corporate headquarters. Texas gets the factories. Texas gets the investment. Texas rolls out the red carpet while Louisiana rolls out another permit, regulation, tax, or lawsuit.

But when it comes to the biggest economic development race of the moment, the script has suddenly flipped.

Louisiana is acting like Texas.

And Texas is starting to act like Louisiana.

The race is over artificial intelligence and the massive data centers needed to power it. Louisiana has gone all-in.

Meta recently announced that its Richland Parish project will grow to more than $50 billion, reach 5 gigawatts of computing capacity, support 7,500 construction jobs, and eventually employ more than 1,000 people. It will be the largest data center in Meta's global fleet and one of the largest ever built.

And Meta isn't the only one. Also announced are plans for Hut 8 to develop a new AI data center campus in West Feliciana Parish, with the first phase representing an investment of up to $10 billion. Louisiana Economic Development announced another $3.6 billion Applied Digital AI campus in Central Louisiana earlier this year. And there are others also in the works.

Louisiana has figured out something pretty simple: AI is coming whether politicians like it or not. The question is whether the billions of dollars in infrastructure needed to power it will be built here, another state, or even China.

Meanwhile, Texas is hitting the brakes.

Gov. Greg Abbott recently ordered a pause on approvals for new data center projects seeking connections to the Texas electric grid.

Texas had already passed legislation requiring large electricity users to shoulder more responsibility for grid reliability and transmission costs. Now, the uncertainty is getting worse. Hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits tied to proposed projects are reportedly caught in limbo, and San Antonio politicians are even discussing their own temporary moratorium on new data centers.

Think about how strange that sounds.

Louisiana is saying: Come build. We'll figure out how to produce the power.

Texas is saying: Hold on. We need to study this.

That is not the Texas-Louisiana economic development story we're accustomed to.

To its credit, Louisiana isn't simply pretending that enormous data centers have no effect on the electric grid. The state has adopted protections intended to make large-load customers pay their way, protect existing ratepayers, strengthen reliability, and require investment in communities and infrastructure.

That's the right approach.

Build the power plants. Build the transmission. Make the companies creating enormous new demand help pay for it. Protect residential customers.

But don't tell investment to wait while politicians spend years studying whether the future should be allowed to arrive.

Louisiana has spent generations watching jobs, people, and capital cross the Sabine River headed west.

For once, Texas may want to check the traffic going the other direction.