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While New Orleans maintains its reputation as a lively city and unique tourist destination, it has also developed a new identity as an emerging technology hub. New Orleans has seen rapid economic and technological growth with an active tech startup scene.
Meta announced their plans to build a $10 billion artificial intelligence optimized data center in north Louisiana. The project is expected to create 500 direct jobs, 1,000 indirect jobs and employ 5,000 construction workers. The data center will be the largest of 30 existing Meta centers across the world.
The expansion of Newlab — a venture platform that helps technology startups develop infrastructure, projects and capital — will facilitate the development of “transformative technologies and drive sustained economic growth in Louisiana” by leveraging the state’s infrastructure, workforce and existing industry leaders.
The official announcement of Newlab’s expansion included remarks from New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
“The future is absolutely coming through the city of New Orleans, [we’re] positioned very well … from all of the sectors that we’re growing,” Cantrell said. “We’re getting it all in this partnership with Newlab.”
In addition to corporations moving into New Orleans, startup activity in the city has facilitated technological innovation.
LookFar is a company that works directly with local startups to promote its growth. Their key service is software development, which is led by LookFar Labs, but other offerings include website and logo design. Twice a month, LookFar publishes the Southern Startup Report, a newsletter covering the latest tech startups in the American southeast.
“There are so many different ways that we help these startups … they come to us at all different stages,” said Lindsay Fox, the vice president of sales and brand strategy at LookFar. “We have a startup that we’re working with that is well-funded and they have a very specific use case, and they already kind of started doing things themselves … We have another early-stage startup where we’re helping build from the ground up.”
Chris Homberg, a co-owner of LookFar Labs, discussed how the technology landscape has changed since LookFar’s inception in 2014.
“There are more technology firms here in the city, it seems from a business perspective,” Homberg said. “That ends up being … kind of a competitive issue.”
The rise of artificial intelligence continues to shape the global economy and influence the technology scene in New Orleans. NOLA AI is a recently established AI startup that builds custom AI models. The Automated Theory of Mind in Communication framework, or the ATōMIC framework, is the cornerstone of NOLA AI’s product development process. The ATōMIC framework provides AI models with a neural network that contextualizes given inputs and promotes AI cognition and reasoning, rather than rote pattern recognition.
“[AI models] don’t have that positional context of what words mean and what words don’t mean. They only have the raw base understanding … And so that’s one of the things that leads to hallucinations,” Zachary Christiansen, chief innovation officer at NOLA AI and Tulane Law School alumnus, said. “So the ATōMIC framework, what it does is we preprocess all the information in a corpus … [and] the [model] gets that information and knows that positional context.”
NOLA AI uses this framework to create custom AI models tailored for individual businesses in New Orleans. Recent projects include those with SARG, the sentiment analysis research group, who partnered with NOLA AI to develop personality models. NOLA AI has also worked with the American Bankruptcy Institute.
While NOLA AI has worked with companies across the nation, their mission is to develop models for the local market.
“One of the fun phrases I like to throw around is NOLA AI wants to be NOLA’s AI,” Christiansen said. “So any company that’s in New Orleans that wants to build an AI product, we’re here to help them create, and we have the tools for them to create AI that works for them, that is not just a wrapper on Open AI or something else, but actually their own AI that they own.”
The rapid growth in New Orleans is influenced by the economic incentives associated with business activity in the city. Wage levels in New Orleans are up to 40% less than other major markets, and utility costs and office space are less expensive than the national average. Tax incentives, including a 25% rebate on software development payroll costs, lower business costs even more.
People working in the city’s tech scene also attribute the rapid technological innovation to the city’s creative spirit and history of resilience.
“The culture … kind of lends itself to a lot of technology individuals, with your developers or founders,” Homberg said. “I think that plays well together, because you’ve got that creative spirit here in New Orleans.”
“I think that New Orleans has had to be a like startup city before … Katrina is the most recent one, but there were hurricanes, big storms that have come before, and [New Orleans] had to, reinvent or rebuild itself multiple times,” Fox said. “And so … the people here are … very resilient.”
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Silicon Bayou: Corporations, startups empower technological innovation in New Orleans – The Tulane Hullabaloo
