Amazon Web Services said Tuesday it is increasing its planned investment in Northwest Louisiana to $18 billion, adding a third data center campus in Shreveport and pushing the total commitment $6 billion above the $12 billion figure the company announced in February, according to Amazon’s newsroom.
The new campus will rise at Resilient Technology Park in west Shreveport, joining two AWS data center campuses already under construction across Caddo and Bossier parishes. Together, the three projects mark one of the largest single corporate investments in Louisiana history and add to a fast-growing cluster of hyperscale computing facilities in the state’s northwest corner.
Amazon said the expanded footprint is expected to support up to 750 full-time data center jobs and roughly 2,500 additional community positions once all three campuses are operational, with as many as 2,250 construction jobs along the way. The incremental Shreveport project alone is projected to generate 210 direct new jobs, and Louisiana Economic Development estimates it will support an additional 499 indirect jobs in the region.
“The real measure of a project like this is how broadly its benefits are felt,” Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan B. Bourgeois said in announcing the expansion.
Amazon executive Keith Klein said the company structured the investment so its data center buildout does not shift costs onto local households. “Amazon pays its own way, and the communities where we operate will be better off because we’re there,” Klein said. The company is funding 100% of the new energy infrastructure and grid upgrades tied to the campuses, at no cost to ratepayers, and is investing in solar generation projects expected to bring 200 megawatts of carbon-free power onto the regional grid. Amazon also committed up to $400 million toward public water infrastructure upgrades in the area, again at no direct cost to residents.
Southwestern Electric Power Co. President Brett Mattison, whose utility serves the region, framed the arrangement around a simple principle: “Growth should pay for growth.”
Beyond infrastructure, Amazon said it has distributed $500,000 to 46 local nonprofits through its Northwest Louisiana Community Fund and is building workforce-development partnerships with area educational institutions to help train residents for data center operations and construction trades.
What’s driving the buildout. The Louisiana expansion is part of a much larger acceleration in AWS’s capital spending as Amazon races to build out cloud and artificial intelligence capacity. Amazon raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to roughly $220 billion and disclosed an AWS contracted backlog of $496 billion in its second-quarter earnings, with executives citing surging demand for AI training and inference infrastructure as the primary driver. That spending has translated into major data center construction commitments not just in Louisiana but in states including Indiana and Oregon.
Louisiana has emerged as an especially active hyperscale market this year. Meta is separately building a $50 billion “Hyperion” data center campus in Richland Parish, though that project’s ownership and financing structure β Meta holds only a 20% equity stake, with the remainder financed through debt-backed private capital β has drawn scrutiny over its tax breaks and ratepayer exposure. Amazon has emphasized that it, not ratepayers, is funding the energy and water infrastructure tied to its Louisiana campuses.
What it means: The $6 billion increase signals that Amazon’s Louisiana bet was not a one-time announcement but an expanding, multi-phase commitment β a pattern likely to repeat as AWS and its hyperscale rivals compete for sites with available power, water and land. For Shreveport-Bossier, the expansion cements Northwest Louisiana as a durable data center hub rather than a single-project win, with construction employment, utility investment and state incentive packages likely to remain a recurring local story through the rest of the decade. For developers and landowners nationally, it is another data point in a trend RealtyWire has tracked closely: data center operators increasingly outbidding other land users for sites near power infrastructure, a dynamic reshaping land economics well beyond Louisiana.
