Louisiana residents are training for jobs at Meta's largest-ever AI data center: 'Why not get in now?'

Louisiana Delta Community College in West Monroe has a mock data center room on campus.

Business Insider Meta is building its largest-ever data center in northeast Louisiana.

A local community college is training data center technicians to work there.

Data center jobs are in high demand and can pay handsomely.

Thousands of construction workers are arriving in a small Louisiana community to build Meta's largest-ever data center .

Less than an hour away, at the Louisiana Delta Community College's West Monroe campus, the next generation of data center professionals is hoping to join their ranks.

"I see AI is really the future.

We're going to need data centers to house all the data," Eric Crowe Jr., 27, told Business Insider.

"I feel like it will become a very lucrative job to have, and we're going to need more of them.

Why not get in now before it gets oversaturated?" Crowe Jr. is among the students who signed up for the community college's Data Center Technician program.

The four-week, nearly $3,700 training course prepares students to enter the data center industry, which is rapidly expanding to support the age of AI.

Construction for Meta's nearly 10-million-square-foot data center, Hyperion, is underway in rural Richland Parish, where business is now thriving as workers flood the region.

Meta says the project will include over 7,500 trade workers on-site at peak construction and support 1,000 operational jobs once completed.

For residents living in the region, where there's no state minimum wage law and agriculture is a major industry, the new opportunity to make good money in a growing sector is too enticing to ignore.