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Construction begins on a Meta data center, located between Stan Roberts Sr. Ave. and State Line Road in Northeast El Paso, Oct. 13, 2025. (Corrie Boudreaux\/El Paso Matters)<\/p>\nThe $1.5 billion data center that Meta Platforms is building on a 1,000-acre parcel in Northeast El Paso will likely use around 400,000 gallons of water per day on average when it\u2019s up-and-running, according to estimates from El Paso Water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The water supply agreement between Meta and the city-owned water utility permits Meta to use as much as 1.5 million gallons of water per day, although the data center\u2019s actual water usage will depend on how hot it is in El Paso.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the temperature is less than 86 degrees, Meta\u2019s not going to use anything\u201d for\u00a0 cooling, John Balliew, El Paso Water\u2019s chief executive, told El Paso Matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The data center would likely use the maximum amount of water allowed \u2013 1.5 million gallons per day \u2013 if it reaches 117 degrees here, according to Balliew.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if you say, \u2018OK, what on average does that look like?\u2019\u201d Balliew said. \u201cEven in a hot year, it\u2019s probably, like, 400,000 gallons per day.\u201d<\/p>\n
A usage level of 400,000 gallons of water per day would not have put Meta on the top-10 list of El Paso Water\u2019s biggest customers last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Construction begins on a Meta data center, located between Stan Roberts Sr. Ave. and State Line Road in Northeast El Paso, Oct. 13, 2025. (Corrie Boudreaux\/El Paso Matters)<\/p>\n
El Paso Electric \u2013 which uses a lot of water for cooling at its power plants \u2013 was the water utility\u2019s\u00a0 biggest customer by far last year, when it purchased 19 million gallons per day. El Paso Electric used about 20% of all the water El Paso Water supplied to customers last year. Big industrial operators such as El Paso Electric and Marathon Petroleum produce some of their own water privately, but purchase the majority of the water they use from El Paso Water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
LEARN MORE: Meta to build $1.5 billion data center in Northeast El Paso<\/a><\/p>\n The other top customers are mostly government entities, such as the federal and county governments. The city of El Paso\u2019s facilities used about 4.4 million gallons per day last year. That includes recreation centers, the convention center and City Hall, among other city-owned buildings.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other top customers of El Paso Water last year included the El Paso and Ysleta school districts, which purchased an average of 946,000 and 740,000 gallons of water per day, respectively, according to El Paso Water\u2019s most recent financial report.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you go back to, let\u2019s say, 1980, 1990, who were the largest customers of El Paso Water? Well, we had ASARCO, we had Phelps-Dodge, we had all these garment finishers \u2026 that used more than a million gallons per day,\u201d Balliew said.\u00a0<\/p>\n SEE ALSO: As rate increases loom, El Paso households could see utility bills jump $45 a month in early 2026<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cAll those people are gone,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, if you ask us right now, \u2018What is your top 10 list of customers?\u2019 Well, you\u2019re going to see schools and hospitals in there that would not have been in the top 10 back in 1990.\u201d<\/p>\n For comparison, El Paso Water can pump a maximum of 157 million gallons of water per day. The utility on a typical day supplies about 110 million gallons of water to its 223,000 customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n El Paso Water\u2019s top executives have consistently said they can meet the demand for Meta\u2019s data center.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, Balliew said there are limits to the amount of big water users the city can accommodate, in part because of water supply but also because the utility can only pump so much water through its existing network of pipes and water mains.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody \u2013 the county and the city \u2013 (felt) that this is a good economic investment for the city. Then we went ahead and did what needed to be done,\u201d Balliew said, referring to Meta\u2019s data center.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut we can\u2019t do this a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cIn Northeast, I don\u2019t think we could do another one.\u201d<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s facility \u2013 similar to the nearby Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa<\/a> \u2013 will house big stacks of computer servers that process information and enable artificial intelligence functions. The developers of both data centers have said they will utilize a closed-loop water system that, during most of the year, will recycle the same water for cooling to transfer out heat from the computer equipment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta declined to comment on this story. In a news release announcing the El Paso data center project, the company said it will \u201crestore 200% of the water consumed by the data center to local watersheds.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta didn\u2019t specify how its water restoration will work in El Paso.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, the company has partnered with nonprofits to implement projects in other arid communities to offset its data centers\u2019 water use, according to a Meta report on water restoration<\/a>.\u00a0 Examples include one project in Arizona to convert farmland irrigation systems from flood irrigation to more water-efficient drip irrigation. Other projects, also in Arizona, involve covering ditch irrigation canals to prevent evaporation and lining dirt canals with concrete to prevent seepage and erosion.<\/p>\n PODCAST: We talk about El Paso\u2019s water future with a top executive from city\u2019s water utility<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe are actively working with local partners to identify restoration projects that will also benefit local communities and habitats,\u201d Meta\u2019s news release said. The company said it will work with the nonprofit Dig Deep, which works to provide first-time water service to colonias that lack water or sewer services.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company has said it will publicly disclose the water consumption figures for its El Paso data center in an annual sustainability report in which Meta shares water usage figures for all of its U.S. data centers.\u00a0<\/p>\n For its part, the developers of Project Jupiter \u2013 including Oracle, OpenAI and Stack Infrastructure \u2013 have said that the data center campus will consume about 20,000 gallons per day for the data center buildings, while a dedicated natural gas power plant that will power the facility will also use 20,000 gallons per day. Project Jupiter will receive water from the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n These big data centers that technology companies are building in El Paso and throughout the country are \u201cfoundational to the broad AI activity, which is having a big impact on the IT tech\/cloud world, and expected to have a broad impact on society as a whole,\u201d Andrew Chien, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and an expert on the nationwide data center buildout, said in an email. \u201cThis is the foundation of the modern\/future internet.\u201d<\/p>\n The last generation of data centers built five or 10 years ago used evaporative-cooling technology rather than closed-loop. Evaporative cooling is more water-intensive, while closed-loop systems use more electricity, Chien said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Closed-loop cooling systems \u201cwere widely used for decades, but had fallen out of favor for the largest facilities because the \u2018evaporative\u2019 cooling techniques allowed lower cost,\u201d Chien said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut it\u2019s proven, so there should be no problem,\u201d he said of closed-loop technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Meta-data-center-rendering.jpg\")
A rendering from Meta depicting the company\u2019s planned El Paso data center. (Meta Platforms) <\/p>\n
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A standing room-only crowd at the University of Texas at El Paso listens as opponents of data centers speak about negative aspects of local data center projects such as Project Jupiter in Santa Teresa and Meta\u2019s data center in Northeast El Paso. (Diego Mendoza-Moyers \/ El Paso Matters) <\/p>\n