Meta to spend $10 billion on AI data center in El Paso, 1GW by 2028
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote during the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta will more than sixfold increase its spending commitment for an upcoming AI data center in West Texas to $10 billion, aiming to reach 1 gigawatt capacity by the time the facility comes online in 2028, the company said Thursday.
The data center being built in El Paso will lead to the creation of 300 new jobs and will require more than 4,000 construction workers at peak, Meta said. The company also said it is committed to adding over 5,000 megawatts of clean energy to the grid and will lighten the water load by working with specialized nonprofits to bring fresh water to the region.
“Since breaking ground last year, we have been proud to call El Paso home and committed to being a good neighbor,” the company said in a blog post Thursday.
When Meta started construction of the 1.2 million square meter facility in October, its planned investment was 1.5 billion dollars. Gary Demasi, Meta’s vice president of data center development, announced the increased investment at the annual Borderplex Alliance summit in El Paso.
Meta is increasing its spending on AI infrastructure as the company and its hyperscaler peers struggle to meet unprecedented and growing demand for computing resources. In its last earnings report in January, Meta said capital spending this year would reach $135 billion.
But unlike its technology rivals Google, Amazon And MicrosoftMeta doesn’t have a cloud infrastructure business, and its high expenses are drawing extra scrutiny from Wall Street. The stock is down 16% for the year, including a 7% drop on Thursday, following two bitter court defeats this week over the company’s failure to adequately police Facebook and Instagram.
Meta transfers resources to AI while reducing costs elsewhere. On Wednesday, the company confirmed to CNBC that hundreds of layoffs are coming across Facebook, global operations, recruiting, sales and virtual reality.
Meta is building a 1GW AI data center in El Paso, Texas, shown here in March 2026, five months after groundbreaking.
Courtesy: Meta
But data center expansion continues.
Meta has a total of 30 data centers, 26 of which are in the USA, with new ones under construction. The El Paso site is the third facility in Texas.
The company is also spending heavily on chips and systems to populate new data centers. In February, the company signed major deals with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devicesand we committed to being the first customer this week. Arm new data center processor. Meta also recently introduced four new versions of its in-house MTIA accelerators, which the company will make public for the first time in 2023.
As scores of AI data centers pop up across the country, the projects have increasingly faced backlash from nearby residents, largely due to fears about water availability and rising electricity costs. The New York Times reported that the taps are dry After Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center in the state of Georgia in 2018.
Meta said Thursday it is working on eight water restoration projects in Texas, including a partnership with water rights nonprofit DigDeep to bring “clean, running water for the first time” to more than 100 homes.
The new data center will be liquid cooled using a closed-loop system that recycles water. In metaprojects, the site’s water use will be similar to a typical golf course in the region.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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