Vicksburg has lived many chapters in Mississippi’s economic story, but the latest one—scripted by a $3 billion Amazon investment—marks a shift from river-town legacy to AI-era frontier.
By 2026, the city is set to host one of the tech giant’s newest artificial intelligence data centers, a sprawling complex that state officials are already calling a transformative foothold in the South’s fast-emerging “Digital Delta.”
When Gov. Tate Reeves stepped forward Thursday to announce the project, he framed it as more than a local win.
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“The future of technology is being built right here in the heart of the ‘Digital Delta,’” he said in a press release that cast the development as both symbolic and strategic.
At its core, the project is straight economic muscle. Amazon will pour $3 billion into Vicksburg and commit $150,000 to help fund a new Warren County educational grant. The data center itself will produce at least 200 high-paying full-time jobs, and another 300 jobs are expected to follow across Warren County—from engineers to network specialists, security teams, and operations managers.
But the story of how Vicksburg secured the deal wasn’t frictionless. “The decision by Amazon to build here was met with a number of challenges that the economic development team had to confront,” said Warren County Board of Supervisors President Kelle Barfield.
She credited state, city, and county officials for clearing those hurdles, arguing that the payoff is now clear.
“The result will be a major boost to our local tax base, securing revenues for services that continue to make Warren County such an ideal place to live and do business,” she said.
Amazon didn’t dispute the economic pitch. In its own release, the company emphasized the project as part of its broader cloud and AI ambitions. Amazon’s data centers power everything from cloud hosting to machine learning tools and the expanding suite of generative AI services that now underpin millions of customers’ digital operations. The Vicksburg campus will be the second Amazon Web Services hub in Mississippi, joining a massive $10 billion facility in Madison County built in 2024, which the governor’s office says created “thousands of indirect jobs.”
Still, the value proposition has been criticized. Across the U.S., the rapid build-out of data centers has been trailed by warnings from environmental groups and watchdog organizations. These facilities don’t just house servers; they drain enormous amounts of electricity and water to keep those servers cool and running. In some communities, that strain has contributed to surging power prices.
Mississippi officials insist that Vicksburg’s infrastructure can handle Amazon’s presence—helped partly by an assurance from Entergy Mississippi, which pledged long-term reliability for the center’s energy needs. The state also sweetened the deal: the project was enabled under the Mississippi Major Economic Impact Act, signed by Reeves in 2024, authorizing $44 million in state incentives.
Amazon, for its part, is trying to make its case not just as a job generator but as a community stakeholder. The company is launching the Warren County Community Fund, a grant program offering up to $10,000 each to residents, nonprofits, schools, and other organizations for projects tied to STEM education, sustainability, digital skills, culture, heritage, health, and well-being.
Amazon’s Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer, David Zapolsky, leaned into that theme.
“We’re investing in the people and communities that make Mississippi strong, from training more than 6,500 Mississippians through our workforce development programs to our new Warren County Community Fund,” he said. “This is what responsible growth looks like—bringing cutting-edge technology infrastructure to America while ensuring local communities benefit directly from that investment.”
That training pipeline is no afterthought. Amazon already works with AccelerateMS, the Mississippi Development Authority, Hinds Community College, and Holmes Community College, delivering programs that have trained more than 6,500 workers statewide and engaged over 1,000 leaders in education and workforce development. The company has also embedded K-12 STEM initiatives in Madison County, Canton Public Schools, and Jackson Public Schools, offering everything from career-awareness sessions to hands-on workshops.
The economic stakes reflect a bigger national undercurrent. As generative AI becomes the backbone of business operations—and a centerpiece of cloud computing—data centers have become the infrastructure of geopolitical importance, coveted by states that want to anchor future industries. That has sparked what amounts to an AI infrastructure arms race across the country, with massive incentives, long-term utility commitments, and multi-billion dollar deals now commonplace.
For Vicksburg, the arrival of Amazon places the city squarely inside that contest. A river town that once defined itself by logistics and history is now being drafted into a future shaped by compute power, energy-intensive cloud clusters, and the promise—as well as the precariousness—of the AI age.
The cranes will arrive soon enough. The first server racks won’t hum until 2026. But for Mississippi policymakers, the ideal thing is that the state wants to be more than a consumer of AI – and it’s becoming a reality.