Social media giant Meta has broken ground on a new data center in El Paso, Texas.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram this week announced work had started on the 1GW site, the company’s 29th data center.
“This will be a powerhouse data center optimized to support our growing AI workloads and will be essential to bringing our technologies to life,” Meta said. “An example of industry-leading infrastructure, this data center can scale to 1GW and represents a pivotal moment as we invest in our AI work.”
News that Meta was targeting a site in El Paso surfaced in late 2023, with the company operating behind the WurldWide LLC affiliate to acquire more than 1,000 acres of land in the northeast of the city.
Some $1.5 billion is set to be invested in the first phase of development. Previous reports suggest there could be up to five phases of development, each totaling around 800,000 sq ft (74,320 sqm).
The site has been designed to support “both the traditional servers of today and future generations of AI-enabled hardware,” and will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that will use zero water for the “majority of the year.”
The land, north of Stan Roberts Sr. Ave. and west of US Highway 54, was previously acquired by the city from the El Paso Public Service Board more than a decade ago. It was originally set aside as a possible site for an automotive manufacturing project that never materialized. There was more talk of a potential manufacturing user for the site around 2019, but nothing came to fruition.
El Paso, located in the west of Texas and close to the borders of Mexico and New Mexico, is not traditionally a major data center hub. Dallas, Austin, and sometimes Houston, all to the east of El Paso, are more popular with data center developers in Texas. Phoenix in Arizona, to the west of El Paso, is also a large data center market.
The campus will be Meta’s third in Texas. The company has data center campuses in Fort Worth and Temple in the Lone Star State. It also operates sites nearby in neighboring Los Lunas, New Mexico, and Mesa, Arizona.
Source: Data Center Dynamics
