Meta Platforms (META.O) announced on Wednesday that it will invest $1.5 billion to build a new data center in El Paso, Texas, marking its 29th facility worldwide and third in the state. The project highlights Meta’s continued expansion of infrastructure to support growing artificial intelligence workloads. Construction has officially begun, and the facility is expected to become operational in 2028. Once completed, it will be able to scale up to a 1-gigawatt site—enough to power a city the size of San Francisco for one day—making it one of the largest planned data center campuses in the United States.

Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken February 16, 2025.

According to Meta, the new data center will generate about 100 permanent jobs after completion, while more than 1,800 workers are expected to be involved during the peak of construction. The company stated that El Paso was chosen due to its reliable electrical grid and skilled labor force. Meta also noted that the facility will be designed with sustainability in mind, operating entirely on renewable energy. It will feature a closed-loop, liquid-cooling system that recycles water and aims to restore twice the amount of water it consumes to local watersheds. This commitment surpasses Meta’s 2030 goal of becoming “water-positive,” meaning it will return more water to the environment than it uses.

Meta said it has invested over $10 billion in Texas so far and employs more than 2,500 people across the state, including this latest investment. The company will fund the current phase of the El Paso site entirely from its own capital. Wednesday’s announcement follows Meta’s recent $29 billion off-balance-sheet agreement with Pimco and Blue Owl to finance a data center campus in Louisiana, underscoring the company’s ongoing investment in digital infrastructure.

Across the technology sector, large cloud service providers—known as hyperscalers—are rapidly expanding AI-related infrastructure. According to company filings, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft are collectively projected to spend over $360 billion in 2025, with most of the capital directed toward data center construction and power systems.

Jon Barela, CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, a local economic development organization that helped facilitate the project, told Reuters: “The fastest gazelle finds their place, others follow, and Meta is the fastest gazelle in the industry, as far as I'm concerned. 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 project originated 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 Meta.

Through this new investment, Meta aims to strengthen its position in AI infrastructure development while supporting economic growth and sustainability efforts in the El Paso region.