Meta Increases El Paso Data Center Investment to $10 Billion

Meta announced on March 26 that it is increasing its investment in the El Paso, Texas AI data center from $1.5 billion to $10 billion. The facility broke ground in October 2025 and is expected to reach 1 gigawatt of capacity by the time it opens in 2028. It will be Meta's 29th data center globally and its third in Texas, covering a 1.2-million-square-foot site. At peak construction, over 4,000 workers will be on site. Once operational, the facility will support more than 300 permanent on-site jobs. Meta's capital spending plans for 2026 sit between $115 billion and $135 billion, a significant jump from the $72.2 billion spent in 2025. The El Paso expansion is one piece of a broader infrastructure push. The company signed large chip deals with Nvidia and AMD in February, this week became the first customer for Arm's new data center processor, and recently disclosed four new versions of its in-house MTIA AI accelerators. Meta has about 30 data centers globally, with 26 in the US. The El Paso facility will be powered partly by clean energy, with Meta saying it has over 5,000 megawatts of clean energy projects under contract in Texas. Water supply arrangements have also been made through nonprofit partners in the area, addressing a concern that has slowed other data center projects in the state. The investment surge comes despite a rough week for Meta. The company's stock dropped nearly 8% after two jury verdicts against it in child safety cases. CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid off around 700 employees on March 25, primarily from Reality Labs, recruiting, and sales, while simultaneously rolling out a stock compensation programme worth up to $921 million per top executive over five years. The infrastructure spending is not slowing regardless. For developers and businesses in Nigeria running workloads on Meta's cloud and AI products, this level of infrastructure investment eventually translates to more capacity, faster inference, and expanded services. The AI tools built on top of this infrastructure, including Meta AI and Llama-based products, will scale as the compute behind them scales. Where the compute goes, the AI products follow.