AVAIO Digital is planning a 760-acre data center campus near Little Rock with a first-phase spend of $6 billion and a roadmap to more than $21 billion, clearly targeting large cloud and AI workloads.
The campus starts with 150 MW from Entergy Arkansas and could scale to 1 GW, putting this firmly in the league of hyperscale AI builds where power availability is the gating factor.
Construction kicks off in early 2026 with initial completion by mid-2027, so this is late-decade capacity that lines up with the next GPU and accelerator refresh cycle.
Arkansas is leaning on fast-tracked energy permitting and incentives to win this deal, signaling that regulatory velocity and power pricing are now core competitive levers in AI data center site selection.
The site is positioned as a multi-phase “data center pole,” suggesting AVAIO will likely court multiple cloud and AI tenants rather than operate as a single-tenant facility.
Entergy frames this as cornerstone load growth that can lower system costs, but it also concentrates grid risk around a few very large AI campuses.
The article is worth a read for how a second-tier market is packaging land, power, and politics to attract AI-scale infrastructure.
