Time-lapse video of Meta’s Richland Parish Data Center under construction (Courtesy Meta) No data center has come knocking on Ascension Parish’s door—and the community’s leaders would like to have the rules written before one does. That was the message last week as Ascension Parish Council m embers moved to regulate a kind of development that doesn’t yet exist within their borders, acting on a hunch that it’s only a matter of time. Right now the parish has no zoning standards built for data centers—no setbacks, no noise limits, no classification for where one could even go. Councilman Chase Melancon wants that settled while the field is still hypothetical. The urgency isn’t coming from a specific proposal. It’s coming from the map around them. Meta is pouring more than $50 billion into a nearly 10-million-square-foot campus in Richland Parish. Amazon is spending $12 billion in Caddo and Bossier. Applied Digital is building a $3.6 billion AI facility in Rapides, and just up the road in West Feliciana, crews broke ground last August on a $12.5 billion bitcoin-mining data center. Part of what convinced the council to act came from beyond the parish line. Council member Blaine Petite said some members were able to attend training sessions with elected officials from around the country who already have data facilities in their communities—and the lesson stuck. “It showed us that we’re not ready to even have the conversation,” he said. The residents made sure their concerns were heard, too. During the meeting, several questioned the process itself and pressed the council to adopt strict safeguards, warning that a data center could strain the parish in ways it isn’t prepared to absorb—heavy water consumption, spiking electricity demand, noise, environmental damage and a lack of public transparency. Melancon stressed that the parish isn’t reacting to anything concrete. No company has applied to build in Ascension, he said, and the point of the exercise is to have firm answers ready if one ever does. “We do not know of a data center that wants to come build anywhere in the parish. But we have to get black-and-white guidelines on if you apply, what that data center looks like, where can it be built, and what’s the proper zoning,” he said. Any regulations the council drafts will pass through the Planning and Zoning Commission before returning for a vote, with multiple public hearings along the way. For Petite, the goal is to draw a hard line before the first applicant ever arrives. “That is what this is for: guidance for our parish to say, ‘If you even think of coming here, these are the rules, and we will not accept anything less,'” he said. Ascension isn’t alone in trying to get ahead of the issue. In May, the East Baton Rouge Parish Metro Council asked its Planning Commission to review and amend the sections of the unified development code that touch on data centers. Metro Council member Anthony Kenney, who helped put the item forward, said the wave of development elsewhere in the country prompted him to check what the city’s code actually spelled out—and he found little. “I did my research with our UDC and noticed that we don’t have anything that clearly defines it,” Kenney said in an interview with Daily Report in May. Without clear definitions, he said, the parish would be left to “piecemeal different aspects of the UDC” to evaluate any proposal. He framed the effort not as opposition to data centers but as a way to guarantee the parish has clear standards and proper public hearings in place. That work is still in its early stages. As of Monday, planning staff were compiling information to add data centers to the unified development code, and nothing had yet been presented to the Planning Commission or Metropolitan Council, according to planning project coordinator Glenn Hanna. There’s no timetable for when it will be. Both parishes are moving as data center development accelerates across Louisiana. Meta announced its Hyperion project in Richland Parish in December 2024 and said earlier this summer it would invest more than $50 billion, expanding the campus to nearly 10 million square feet with 5 gigawatts of IT capacity. Amazon announced in February that it would put $12 billion into campuses in Caddo and Bossier parishes to support cloud computing. In May, Applied Digital unveiled Delta Forge 1, a $3.6 billion AI data center in Rapides Parish. And in the Capital Region, construction began last August on the $12.5 billion facility that bitcoin mining company Hut 8 is developing in West Feliciana Parish—a reminder that the conversation Ascension wants to prepare for is already unfolding all around it. ...read more read less