Meta has switched on a giant new server farm in Temple, pitching it as the first data center anywhere to be built specifically for the AI era. The opening puts a major piece of Meta’s Texas expansion into service while residents keep asking what all those computers will mean for local water, electricity and summer heat. The building is online; the neighborhood debate is not.
The roughly 760,000-square-foot facility is now operational and is Meta’s first AI-optimized data center to come online worldwide, according to Spectrum News. Meta says the design brings AI considerations into the hardware, network layout and cooling systems, rather than treating the building as a conventional warehouse for servers. The company has three Texas projects in play: operating sites in Temple and Fort Worth, plus an El Paso facility still under construction.
Temple Facility Took Four Years To Reach The Finish Line
The site began serving traffic last Wednesday, more than four years after Meta first announced the project, Data Center Dynamics reported. The facility sits on 393 acres near NW H.K. Dodgen Loop and Industrial Boulevard, and Meta says the project represents about $1.2 billion in investment. Around 1,200 workers were on site during peak construction, with roughly 100 ongoing operational roles expected once the facility is fully staffed.
Meta Says Cooling And Power Costs Won’t Land On Neighbors
Meta is emphasizing the facility’s environmental design as it tries to answer the questions surrounding its arrival. In its Temple fact sheet, the company says the center uses a closed-loop liquid-cooling system that will require zero water for most of the year, while a conservation partnership is projected to save about 5.2 million gallons annually.
The company also says it has worked with Oncor Electric and the City of Temple to plan for the site’s utility needs and pay the full cost of service. Meta says its electricity use will be matched with 100% clean and renewable energy, a pledge it says will keep the burden from being passed to nearby residents, according to the company’s Temple data center fact sheet.
Temple Residents Still Question The Heat And Water Math
Those assurances have not ended the pushback over data centers in Temple, where residents have raised concerns about water, power demand and the possibility of added heat around the facilities. Joe Royer, president of the grassroots group Temple Stands Together, told Spectrum News, “The heat island alone... no one has addressed that at all.”
Meta says it will release sustainability reports in the fall, giving residents and local officials more data to compare with the company’s promises. That reporting could become especially important as Temple weighs the benefits of high-tech investment against the very tangible questions of who pays, who benefits and who lives closest to the cooling equipment.
Meta Is Building Out A Larger Texas AI Footprint
Temple is now Meta’s second operational data center in Texas, while the company’s El Paso project is being built to support AI workloads and eventually scale to as much as 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, according to Meta’s El Paso announcement. For Temple, that means the city is no longer simply hosting a big new industrial facility; it is becoming an early test case for how Central Texas communities live with the infrastructure behind the AI boom.
