SproutVest Field Notes · No. 3 · September 2026
The Second Wave: An Operator's Guide to Siting Compute in the Gulf South
The announced gigawatts belong to the announcers
The Gulf South's announcement stack is the largest concentration of committed industrial capital in the region's history. A $100 billion spaceport commitment in Vermilion Parish. An AI campus in Richland Parish that grew from a $10 billion announcement into a build its owner now characterizes at more than $50 billion, powered by roughly ten new gas-fired plants totaling some 7.5 gigawatts. A multi-campus data center program in the northwest announced at $12 billion and later characterized at $18 billion. Behind those, the energy and industrial pipeline that pushed the state past $250 billion in announced investment.
Read the financing mechanism under each announcement and a pattern emerges that the press releases never state. The anchor tenant funds the power, under agreements running fifteen years, and the same structure repeats across the stack: the customer brings a balance sheet that can finance power plants, commits for a decade or more, and receives remarkable institutional speed in return. Hold a 20 megawatt (MW) project against that template and the mismatch is total. A second-wave tenant cannot finance a 750 MW plant, and no one will build one for it. The expedited approval pathway the state's utility regulator adopted in December 2025 makes the point structurally: qualification turns on long-term supply commitments and executive-branch endorsement, which are hyperscaler artifacts. The fast lane is real. It is simply not your lane.
Announced capacity is not inventory. The second wave will negotiate for power parcel by parcel, with institutions whose structure, not whose enthusiasm, determines the outcome. That structure is mappable, and the map is below, free to read.
The territory map
Louisiana's electricity is delivered by three kinds of institutions. Investor-owned utilities (IOUs) own generation and answer to the Public Service Commission and their shareholders. Distribution cooperatives, which serve most of the state's land area, own poles and wires but in most cases no generation at all, buying power wholesale under contracts they did not write for your load. And one significant municipal utility owns the entire stack under a single civic roof. Every entity also belongs to a regional transmission organization (RTO), the wholesale market whose interconnection queue governs new load: most of Louisiana sits in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), while the northwest corner sits in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP). A 20 MW request means a fundamentally different process, timeline, and decision-maker depending on which of these serves your parcel.
| Entity | Type | Territory | Generation vs. wholesale | RTO | Announced large-load commitments | Realistic pathway for a 5 to 50 MW request |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entergy Louisiana | IOU | Most of south and east Louisiana, incl. Richland (Meta) and West Feliciana (Hut 8) | Owns and builds generation; ~10 customer-funded gas plants (~7.5 GW) filed or approved for one data center customer | MISO | Meta Hyperion (Phase 1 approved, Phase 2 filed); Hut 8 River Bend service agreement | Direct large-load process, but attention is consumed by hyperscale proceedings and every request lands amid ratepayer scrutiny. Expect cost-allocation questions first. |
| Cleco Power | IOU | 24 parishes across central and south Louisiana and the north shore | Owns ~2,676 MW across 5 facilities (a second Cleco figure of 3,035 MW exists; see the report's conflict register) | MISO | Applied Digital Delta Forge 1, Rapides: up to 430 MW; new 756 MW plant and Tenaska capacity purchase filed | The most explicitly large-load-friendly IOU in the state. Direct negotiation is realistic at second-wave size. |
| SWEPCO (Southwestern Electric Power Company) | IOU (American Electric Power, AEP) | Northwest Louisiana: Caddo, Bossier, DeSoto and surrounding | AEP fleet plus third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) | SPP | Amazon Web Services (AWS) multi-campus program, $12B announced, later characterized at $18B | SPP queue and AEP process, not MISO. Hyperscaler cluster territory; second-wave requests compete with an anchor tenant's buildout. |
| Lafayette Utilities System (LUS) | Municipal | Lafayette | Owns ~740 MW across four stations plus transmission; owns LUS Fiber | MISO | None announced at hyperscale | Generation, wires, fiber, and permitting under one roof. One of the few entities that can decide to serve a mid-scale load and then execute the decision itself. |
| SLEMCO (Southwest Louisiana Electric Membership Corp.) | Distribution co-op | Acadiana around Lafayette (~119,000 members) | Owns no generation; buys all power wholesale | MISO | None announced | The co-op cannot unilaterally commit. A request travels upstream into its wholesale arrangement and the MISO process. Gauge wholesale headroom before optioning land. |
| DEMCO (Dixie Electric Membership Corp.) | Distribution co-op | Seven southeast parishes incl. Ascension, East Baton Rouge, Livingston (~100,000+ members) | Full-requirements wholesale contract with Cleco | MISO | None announced | Largest co-op in the state, but the yes you need is ultimately Cleco's and MISO's, reached through DEMCO. Two institutions, one request. |
| Beauregard Electric (BECi) | Distribution co-op | Allen, Beauregard, Calcasieu, Evangeline, Jeff Davis, Rapides, Vernon (~43,000 meters) | Distribution only; wholesale supplied | MISO | None announced | Southwest gas-and-industrial country. High political access, thin grid: best suited to behind-the-meter or gas-adjacent structures. |
| Jeff Davis Electric | Distribution co-op | Allen, Calcasieu, Cameron, Jefferson Davis, Vermilion (~11,000 meters) | Distribution only; wholesale supplied | MISO | None announced; territory includes the Vermilion aerospace announcement area | Any material load is transformative for a very small institution, which cuts both ways: access is easy, capacity to say yes alone is minimal. |
| 1803 Electric Cooperative | Generation and transmission (G&T) co-op | Wholesale supplier to member distribution co-ops | G&T entity formed to supply member systems | MISO | None announced | Not a retail counterparty, but the upstream answer behind several distribution co-ops. This is where the wholesale headroom question actually gets answered. |
| Other distribution co-ops (Claiborne, Washington-St. Tammany, Pointe Coupee, SLECA, Concordia, NE Louisiana Power, Panola-Harrison) | Distribution co-ops | Remaining rural territory statewide | Distribution only; wholesale supplied through varying arrangements | MISO (Panola-Harrison edges under review) | None announced | The co-op's enthusiasm is not the co-op's authority. Identify the wholesale supplier first; that is your real counterparty. |
Three patterns carry everything in the table. The IOUs are where direct large-load negotiation is possible, and among them Cleco stands apart: its territory covers exactly the central-Louisiana and Acadiana corridors where second-wave sites are plausible, and its filings show it will build and buy capacity for the right load. The cooperative layer is structurally incapable of a unilateral yes, because a distribution co-op that owns no generation is passing your request upstream, and from there into the MISO process, on timelines none of those parties owes you. And the municipal exception, LUS, is the one entity in the state where a mid-scale project can find generation, wires, fiber, and permitting authority in a single negotiation. The practical consequence: territory selection is the first diligence act, before land, before incentives, before design.
Inside the full report
The incentive stack at 5, 20, and 50 MW
Why the headline exemption's $200 million and fifty-job floors exclude most of the second wave, verified against the statute, and the accessible layer almost nobody uses: the High Impact Jobs Program, FastStart, and the local PILOT conversation.
Scrutiny is now part of the timeline
The four cost-allocation questions every large-load project now gets asked by commissioners, co-op boards, and parish bodies, and what a credible written answer looks like at second-wave size.
The worked 20 MW example
One hypothetical inference project run across three territory types, IOU direct-serve, wholesale-dependent co-op, and municipal, then through the Field Notes No. 1 build, buy, rent framework, where the energization date decides the deal.
The diligence checklist and the regulatory tracker
What to ask the utility, the landowner, and the economic development organization before any letter of intent, with what a bad answer sounds like, plus a dated appendix of the proceedings that will move this market through December.
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Disclosure
Erick Watson was Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer of Chainlodge, a data center venture that operated at 1 MW with headroom to 5 MW and wound down in 2026. That is the supply-side vantage point this edition is written from, and it is also a commercial interest in the market the report describes. You should know that before you read the pathways, not after.