Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote address during the annual Meta Connect event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta is increasing its spending commitment on a future AI data center in West Texas by more than sixfold to $10 billion, with the goal of reaching 1 gigawatt of capacity by the time the facility is operational in 2028, the company said Thursday.
Construction of the data center in El Paso will result in the creation of 300 new jobs, Meta said, with more than 4,000 construction workers needed at peak times. The company also said it is committed to adding more than 5,000 megawatts of clean electricity to the grid and reducing water pollution by working with specialized nonprofit organizations to provide fresh water to the region.
“Since breaking ground last year, we have been proud to call El Paso home and are committed to being a good neighbor,” the company said in a blog post Thursday.
When Meta began construction on the 1.2 million square meter site in October, the planned investment was $1.5 billion. Gary Demasi, Meta’s vice president of data center development, announced the increased investment at an annual Borderplex Alliance summit in El Paso.
Meta is increasing its spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure as the company and its hyperscaler rivals seek to meet what they say is unprecedented and soaring demand for computing resources. In its last earnings report in January, Meta said capital spending for the year would be up to $135 billion.
But unlike tech competitors Google, Amazon And MicrosoftMeta doesn’t have a cloud infrastructure business, and its big spending is drawing particular attention from Wall Street. The stock has fallen 17% for the year, including an 8% drop on Thursday that followed two stinging court defeats this week that stemmed from the company’s failure to adequately monitor Facebook and Instagram.
Meta has cut costs elsewhere by investing resources in AI. On Wednesday, the company confirmed to CNBC that there are hundreds of layoffs across Facebook, global operations, recruiting, sales and virtual reality departments.
Meta is building a 1 GW AI data center in El Paso, Texas, here in March 2026, five months after breaking ground.
Courtesy: Meta
However, the expansion of the data center continues.
Meta has a total of around 30 data centers, including new ones in the works, including 26 in the USA. The El Paso location is the third in Texas.
The company is also spending heavily on chips and systems to fill the new data centers. In February, the company signed major contracts with Nvidia and Advanced micro devicesand this week committed to becoming the first customer for Weapons new data center processor. Meta also recently introduced four new versions of its in-house MTIA accelerators, which the company first made available to the public in 2023.
As a flood of AI data centers spring up across the country, the projects are increasingly facing backlash from local residents, particularly due to concerns about water availability and rising electricity costs. The New York Times reported that taps ran dry in a Georgia county after Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center there in 2018.
Meta said Thursday that it is working on eight water restoration projects in Texas, including a partnership with water rights nonprofit DigDeep to bring clean, running water to over 100 homes “for the first time.”
The new data center is liquid-cooled and uses a closed-loop system that recycles water. Meta predicts the site’s water use will be similar to that of a typical golf course in the region.
—CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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