Facebook owner Meta will spend $1.5 billion on another data center

The social media giant is expanding its infrastructure to handle AI workloads.

The El Paso data center, Meta's third in Texas, is scheduled to launch in 2028 and will be scalable to 1 gigawatt – 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, known as hyperscalers, are racing to build AI infrastructure, with Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft expected to spend more than $360 billion in 2025. Most of the investment is expected to go to powering data centers, Reuters reports.

The new facility is expected to create around 100 jobs once operational, and more than 1,800 workers are expected on site at peak construction times, Meta said in a statement.

The company cited El Paso's robust power grid and skilled workforce as factors influencing its location selection, Reuters reports.