Meta Platforms said on Oct. 15, 2025, that it would invest $1.5 billion in a data center in El Paso, Texas, reuters.com reported.
By breaking ground at its 29th such global facility, the social media giant is expanding its infrastructure to support artificial intelligence workloads.
The data center will be Meta's third in Texas, according to reuters.com. It is expected to come online in 2028 and can scale to a 1-gigawatt site. That's enough to power San Francisco for a day, which makes it one of the United States' largest planned data center campuses.
Reuters.com reported that large-scale cloud service providers known as hyperscalers have raced to build AI infrastructure. In company filings, Meta said that Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft are projected to spend more than $360 billion in 2025, with most of that money expected to go toward powering data centers.
Once operational, the new El Paso facility is projected to create approximately 100 jobs. There will be more than 1,800 construction workers onsite at peak construction, Meta said in a statement. The company cited El Paso's robust electrical grid and skilled workforce as site selection factors.
Meta has invested more than $10 billion in Texas, while employing more than 2,500 people statewide, according to the company.
The company is funding the current phase of the El Paso site with $1.5 billion of its own money, reuters.com reported. The announcement follows Meta's recent $29 billion off-balance-sheet deal with Pimco and Blue Owl that's funding a Louisiana data center campus.
"The fastest gazelle finds their place, others follow, and Meta is the fastest gazelle in the industry, as far as I'm concerned," said Jon Barela, CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, a local economic development and policy advocacy group 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 a referral from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's office about the Meta project came in about four years ago, with El Paso offering a package of tax and other incentives to attract the company.
Meta said the data center will be matched with 100 percent renewable energy, according to reuters.com.
The facility will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that continuously recycles water. Meta had pledged to restore twice the amount of water consumed by the data center to local watersheds. That would exceed its 2030 goal to restore more water than it consumes.
