According to a new filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, Wurldwide LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Meta, has embarked on the development of 600 acres of land in northeast El Paso for the next phase of Meta’s “Project Seafox.” Construction of the new phase is valued at about $289 million and began in November 2025, TDLR records show. During this phase of development, Wurldwide LLC will construct 12 new buildings and five “owner substations” covering nearly 26 million square feet.
Overall, Meta plans to develop more than 1,000 acres of land over the course of five phases. It’ll take more than 4,000 people to build the data center, which will join existing Meta data centers in Fort Worth and Temple to become the company’s third in Texas. Once complete, the Meta El Paso Data Center will employ more than 300 people and have a 1-gigawatt capacity meant to facilitate Meta’s growing reliance on AI models and its goal to use AI “to build toward superintelligence,” company officials stated.
Meta began making inroads in El Paso in 2023, when it sought to purchase the 1,039-acre property located near the intersection of Stan Roberts Sr. Avenue and U.S. 54 on El Paso’s northeast side. In December 2023, both the El Paso City Council and the El Paso County Commissioners Court approved massive economic incentives for Meta to choose West Texas. In total, Meta stands to receive at least $550 million in property tax abatements over the next 35 years, according to a subsidy tracking tool maintained by Good Jobs First.
But, in a desert region marked by a river that offers an unpredictable water supply, Meta has pledged to not only minimize water consumption at the massive data center, but return more water to El Paso’s supply than it will draw.
“For El Paso, we will restore 200% of the water consumed by the data center to local watersheds,” Meta officials said on March 26.
The company did not state how it intends to create that surplus water, but also added that the El Paso data center will use a “closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that recirculates the same water and will use zero water for a majority of the year.”
El Paso Water officials confirmed that, at times, the data center’s cooling systems will not draw water from the city on days when the temperatures are less than 86 degrees Fahrenheit, according to El Paso Matters. But on average, El Paso Water expects the Meta data center to use about 400,000 gallons per day and could use as much as 1.5 million gallons per day if temperatures exceed 115 degrees.
But the data center will require more than water. It’ll also require enormous amounts of electricity. To that end, Meta is paying for El Paso Electric to build a new 366-megawatt, $473 million natural gas plant adjacent to the data center site. El Paso Electric calls the plant the McCloud facility.