Meta commits $1.5 billion for AI data center in Texas

By Echo Wang NEW YORK (Reuters) -Meta Platforms said on Wednesday it would invest $1.5 billion in a data center in Texas, breaking ground at its 29th such facility globally, as the social media giant expands infrastructure to support artificial intelligence workloads. The data center in El Paso, Meta's third in Texas, is expected to come online in 2028, and can scale to a 1-gigawatt site – enough energy to power a city the size of San Francisco for a day – making it one of the largest planned data center campuses in the U.S. Large-scale cloud service providers, called hyperscalers, have been racing to build AI infrastructure, with Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft projected to spend over $360 billion in 2025, according to company filings. Most of the investment is expected to go toward powering data centers. The new facility is projected to create about 100 jobs once operational, with over 1,800 construction workers expected onsite at peak construction, Meta said in a statement. The company cited El Paso's robust electrical grid and skilled workforce as factors in the site selection. Meta has invested over $10 billion in Texas and employs more than 2,500 people across the state, the company said. These figures include the latest investment.  The company is putting up $1.5 billion of its own money to fund the current phase of the El Paso site. Wednesday's announcement follows Meta's recent $29 billion off-balance-sheet deal with Pimco and Blue Owl to fund a data center campus in Louisiana. "The fastest gazelle finds their place, others follow, and Meta is the fastest gazelle in the industry, as far as I'm concerned," Jon Barela, CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, a local economic development and policy advocacy group involved in facilitating the project, told Reuters. "We've had others look at the region, other data centers, and we expect there probably to be others that will want to follow."  Barela said the Meta project first came from a referral from Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office about four years ago, and El Paso offered a package of tax incentives and other measures to attract the company. Meta said the data center will be matched with 100% renewable energy. The facility will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that continuously recycles water. Meta pledged to restore twice the water consumed by the data center to local watersheds, exceeding its 2030 goal to be "water-positive" by restoring more water than it consumes. (Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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