Meta lifts El Paso data centre investment to $10B for 1GW AI hub
What's the deal? Meta has increased its investment in a data centre in El Paso, Texas, from $1.5B to more than $10B — a nearly sevenfold jump. The facility, which broke ground in 2025, will scale to one gigawatt of capacity and is expected to come online in 2028. It will support more than 300 permanent on-site jobs and 4,000 construction workers at peak. Meta did not explain what drove the increase.
Why now? Meta's chief executive officer Mark ZuckerbergDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has committed to spending aggressively on AI infrastructure, projecting up to $135B in capital expenditure in 2026 alone. The company already has more than 30 data centres operational or in development, and its newest facilities are being built to at least one gigawatt — enough to power around 750,000 homes.
El Paso fits a broader pattern of hyperscalers racing to lock in AI compute capacity before rivals. With data centre construction timelines measured in years, committing capital now is the only way to stay competitive.
What could go wrong? El Paso sits in the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the most water-stressed regions in the US. Meta says it will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that requires zero water for most of the year and has committed to restoring 200% of the water it does consume to local watersheds. Whether those commitments hold at one-gigawatt scale is untested.
Energy supply is another constraint. Meta has committed to adding enough clean energy to the local grid to match 100% of the data centre's electricity use — a significant undertaking for a utility the size of El Paso ElectricDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
The signal: The El Paso expansion shows how the AI infrastructure race is reshaping American economic geography. Tech giants are no longer building only in coastal hubs — they are moving into mid-sized Sun Belt cities, drawn by available land, lower costs, and transmission infrastructure.
At $10B, this single facility is transformational for El Paso. For Meta, it is one of dozens of projects in a buildout running into hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sources:
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