Meta Plans 10B El Paso Data Center Campus

Facebook’s parent company is taking a step toward its goal of catching up with its competitors in the AI arms race by building a behemoth data center campus in West Texas.

Meta already started construction on the $10 billion project, according to a state filing, MySA reported. At full build-out, the project will span 1,000 acres.

The latest state filing is for the first of the project’s five phases. The first phase involves the construction of 12 buildings and 5 “owner substations” across 600 acres. Construction is expected to cost $289 million. Work on the campus, dubbed “Project Seafox,” began in November, according to the filing, and is supposed to wrap up in February 2029.

Project Seafox will have a 1-gigawatt capacity, power meant to bring Meta closer to its goal of using artificial intelligence to build “superintelligence,” the outlet reported.

In addition to the West Texas development, Meta has also constructed two other data centers in Texas — one in Fort Worth and another in Temple.

The new filing comes on the heels of Meta’s release of Muse Spark earlier this month. It’s the first AI platform to be released by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s consolidated AI division that launched late last year in an effort to close the gap between Meta and competitors like Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.

In addition, the El Paso project is moving forward as data center projects in other parts of the state are being put on ice. For example, Zydeco Development pulled a rezoning request for a data center project in Hutto, a suburb of Austin, after a flood of criticism from residents. Opponents of the project cited concerns over water, electricity and overall fit in the neighborhood, the Austin Business Journal reported.

Resistance to the data center boom is playing out across the country, including in Chicago and the Bay area.

— Jess Hardin