Editor’s note: This story has been updated throughout.
Meta, the company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, will invest at least $1.5 billion to build a large data center complex in Northeast El Paso.
Meta representatives announced the company’s El Paso project Wednesday, Oct. 15, during an event at the Plaza Hotel Pioneer Park in Downtown attended by El Paso government and community leaders.
“This is a huge economic shot in the arm for this region,” El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said.
This is not a surprise, since El Paso City Council approved massive tax breaks for the project in December 2023, and Meta purchased the 1,039-acre site from the city in the same month.
Artist renderings show what Meta’s $1.5B data center in Northeast El Paso will look like.
The artificial intelligence (AI)-focused data center will be Meta’s 25th in the United States and third in Texas. It’s projected to come online in 2028. Site work has already begun.
The complex will be at Stan Roberts Avenue and U.S. Highway 54.
The city had set aside the land to help attract a large project. And the “shovel-ready site “ is one thing that got Meta interested in El Paso, Brad Davis, Meta’s data center community and economic development director, said after the announcement.
The complex’s first phase will employ 100 permanent employees in good-paying jobs, and 1,800 construction workers during construction, Davis said.
Data centers house computers and servers to process data for customers. However, they don’t have large workforces.
The first phase of the El Paso complex will have two data center buildings with 1.2 million square feet and cost about $1.5 billion, including equipment costs, Davis said.
Other phases are likely, but will be based on Meta’s business, which is expected to continue to grow, he said.
It eventually could scale up to use 1 gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, of power, according to Meta’s media release. That’s enough energy to power a city the size of San Francisco for a day, and would make it one of the largest planned data center campuses in the country, Reuters news service reported.
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Adriana Cruz, Texas director of economic development and tourism, and Brian Davis, Meta’s director of community and economic development, attended the event announcing Meta’s new data center investment Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025 in El Paso, Texas
The first phase will use about 220 megawatts of power, and will be supplied by El Paso Electric’s existing power sources through an agreement between the utility and Meta, said Kelly Tomblin, El Paso Electric chief executive officer.
That’s enough electricity to power more than 100,000 El Paso homes.
Future growth will require another 220 megawatts that is to come from a gas-fired power plant to be built on the Meta site and paid for by Meta, Tomblin said.
Meta has already paid EPE $128 million for electric infrastructure costs, she said. EPE also is building a substation at the site to serve the data center complex.
Meta’s power uses won’t adversely affect EPE’s other customers, Tomblin said.
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Artist renderings show what Meta’s $1.5B data center in Northeast El Paso will look like.
The complex’s water usage is expected to be low because it will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system, according to Meta information.
John Balliew, El Paso Water chief executive officer, has said that the Meta complex won’t be a high water-consuming business.
Jon Barela, CEO of the Boderplex Alliance, a regional economic development organization, said the Meta site will be transformational for this area and will bring many more jobs than Meta has so far promised.
Meta’s 6-year-old data center complex in Los Lunas, New Mexico has transformed the economy of that area, and the El Paso site will be bigger, Barela said. He was New Mexico economic development director when that project was announced in 2016.
Meta’s long-awaited El Paso announcement comes only weeks after Dona Ana County commissioners in New Mexico gave the green light with tax breaks for a planned, huge data center complex that is to cost about $165 billion over many years in the Santa Teresa area, near El Paso’s West Side.
Meta’s Davis said he didn’t know much about the Santa Teresa project, but he said, “From our standpoint, the more activity in an area for this type of industry is good. I think it brings other service providers, other economic impact to the larger area.”
Vic Kolenc may be reached at 915-546-6421; vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; @vickolenc on Twitter, now known as X.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Meta to build $1.5B data center in Northeast El Paso