Meta has begun serving traffic from its data center in Temple, Texas, marking the start of operations at a facility the company says represents $1.2 billion in investment.

The company said on July 22 that the site had officially commenced operations, more than four years after plans for the project were first shared. The Temple facility is located on 393 acres off NW H K Dodgen Loop and Industrial Blvd.

When completed, the data center was planned to cover about 900,000 square feet (83,600 sqm). Construction started in Spring of 2022, but the project was paused by December 2022 as Meta redesigned its data centers for artificial intelligence workloads. Work resumed in October 2023.

In a LinkedIn post, Meta's VP of data center development and strategy, Gary Demasi, said the Temple facility is "the first to go live with Meta's new AI-optimized data center design."

Temple is Meta's second data center in Texas. The company began work on its 2.6 million sq ft (241,545 sqm) Fort Worth facility in 2015 and brought that site online in 2017.

At peak construction, around 1,200 workers were employed at the Temple site. Meta said 100 ongoing operational roles are now in place.

The company has said the data center uses a water-efficient closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that will use zero water for a majority of the year. It is also supporting a local water conservation and restoration project that puts 5.2 million gallons of water back into the watershed.

Meta added that the facility's electricity use is matched with 100 percent clean energy. Since construction began, the company has signed a 240MW solar PPA in Texas.

Temple, in Bell County, sits between Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth regions. The city is also seeing other data center development, with Rowan developing a 300MW data center there and Atlas Development having filed for a 12-building data center campus nearby.

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