Meta just broke ground on its most ambitious infrastructure project yet - a $1.5 billion AI-optimized data center in El Paso, Texas, that can scale to a staggering 1 gigawatt of capacity. The facility marks a pivotal moment in Meta's race toward artificial general intelligence, representing the company's 29th data center and largest single investment in AI infrastructure to date.
Meta is making its boldest bet yet on the AI revolution. The social media giant just broke ground on a massive new data center in El Paso, Texas, that can scale to 1 gigawatt of power - enough to rival small cities and position Meta as a serious player in the infrastructure arms race powering artificial intelligence.
The $1.5 billion facility represents more than just another data center. It's Meta's admission that the path to superintelligence requires unprecedented computing power, and the company isn't waiting around to see if competitors beat them there. According to the official announcement, this will be Meta's 29th data center globally, but the first specifically designed from the ground up for AI workloads.
What makes this different from traditional data centers? Meta's engineers have built flexibility into every system. "AI, and its inference and training needs, is still evolving," the company explained in its statement. "Different AI configurations will require different approaches to hardware and network systems designs." Translation: they're building for AI chips that don't even exist yet.
The choice of El Paso isn't random. The city sits at the intersection of major power grids and offers the robust electrical infrastructure needed to support a 1GW facility. That's roughly equivalent to powering 750,000 homes, according to industry standards. Meta's partnership with The Borderplex Alliance and El Paso Electric includes upgrading local grid infrastructure with new transmission lines and substations - essentially rewiring part of Texas for the AI age.
This marks Meta's third data center in the Lone Star State, bringing the company's total Texas investment to over $10 billion. The facility will create approximately 100 permanent operational jobs and employ over 1,800 construction workers at peak build-out. But the real story is what this says about Meta's AI ambitions.
While tech giants have been throwing around terms like "AGI" and "superintelligence," Meta is putting serious money behind the words. The company's smart glasses, AI assistants, live translation tools, and video editing features all rely on massive computational resources. But this new facility suggests Meta is preparing for AI applications we haven't seen yet.
