Meta announced that it will boost its spending commitment on an upcoming data centre in West Texas by more than sixfold to US$10 billion (A$14.47 billion).
The company aims to grow the El Paso Data Center to 1 gigawatt capacity by the time the facility comes online in 2028.
Meta said the data centre will support more than 300 jobs once completed, and that it anticipates that there will be over 4,000 construction workers on-site at the peak of construction.
“Since breaking ground last year, we have been proud to call El Paso home and are committed to being a good neighbour,” the company said in a blog post.
The company also said it was committed to minimising the environmental impact of its data centres.
“When it comes to water, we prioritise water stewardship, and our goal is to be water positive in 2030, where Meta will restore more water than we consume globally,” Meta said.
“For El Paso, we will restore 200% of the water consumed by the data centre to local watersheds.”
When Meta first started construction on the El Paso data centre in October, it planned to invest $1.5 billion.
Meta has continued to ramp up spending on AI infrastructure to keep up with competitors and to meet what they say is unprecedented and soaring demand for computing resources.
In its latest earnings report in January, Meta said capital expenditures for the year would reach up to $135 billion.
However, Meta doesn’t have a cloud infrastructure business like rivals Google, Amazon and Microsoft and is facing extra scrutiny from Wall Street for its hefty spending.
Meta has a total of about 30 data centres, including new ones in the works, with 26 of the facilities in the U.S. The El Paso site is its third in Texas.
At the time of writing, Meta (NASDAQ: META) stock fell 7.96% to $547.54. Its market cap is $1.39 trillion.
