Meta to invest $1.5 billion in new AI data centre
Meta highlighted the choice of El Paso due to the region’s robust infrastructure and skilled workforce.
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Meta has revealed plans to construct a new gigawatt-scale data centre in El Paso, Texas, as part of its ongoing push to bolster artificial intelligence capabilities. The facility, capable of scaling up to 1GW, will be the company’s 29th data centre and is expected to be operational by 2028.
The El Paso centre has been designed to support both current server infrastructure and future generations of AI-enabled hardware. Meta has committed over $1.5 billion to the project, which will create roughly 100 permanent operational jobs and employ more than 1,800 construction workers at its peak.
Meta highlighted the choice of El Paso due to the region’s robust infrastructure and skilled workforce. The company has also pledged that the data centre will run entirely on renewable energy and restore 200% of the water it consumes to local watersheds.
This investment forms part of Meta’s broader capital expenditure strategy, which totals $72 billion this year. The tech giant has aggressively expanded its AI operations, establishing Superintelligence Labs earlier this year and appointing former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the initiative.
Meta competes with AI leaders such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, aiming to advance towards superintelligence — a theoretical stage where AI systems achieve or surpass human-level proficiency across most tasks. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has emphasised that overspending on AI is preferable to risking falling behind in this rapidly evolving field.
In Texas alone, Meta has invested over $10 billion across three data centres and employs more than 2,500 full-time staff across its facilities, offices, and research labs. The new El Paso data centre underlines the company’s commitment to building the infrastructure needed for next-generation AI systems.
