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Meta's El Paso data center to be operational by 2028

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Hyperscalers projected to spend over $360 billion on AI

infrastructure by 2025

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Meta's El Paso site to use 100% renewable energy and

recycle

water

By Echo Wang

NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms ( META )

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 ( AMZN ),

Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft ( MSFT ) 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.