Meta brings $1.2 billion Temple, Texas AI-optimized datacenter online as first US hyperscaler facility, part of 6 GW AMD rollout.
Meta began operations at its $1.2 billion data center in Temple, Texas on July 22, 2026, marking the company's first AI-optimized facility in the United States. The campus spans 386 acres at 3101 Industrial Boulevard, approximately 65 miles north of Austin, and comprises three buildings totaling more than 750,000 square feet of data center and administrative space.
The project originated with groundbreaking in spring 2022 under an initial $800 million investment budget. Meta paused and redesigned the facility in 2023 to accommodate AI-specific workloads, ultimately raising the total investment to $1.2 billion. The redesign added liquid-cooling infrastructure to support GPU-dense compute clusters, a pattern Meta also applied to its Idaho data center project.
The Temple facility is designed as a hybrid cooling architecture: dry-cooling towers handle base thermal loads without consuming water, while a closed-loop liquid-cooling system addresses higher-density AI compute racks. Meta engineered the liquid-cooling system to use zero water for the majority of the year—a notable design choice for central Texas. The facility operates with approximately 198 MW of power capacity and accommodates both traditional air-cooled servers and liquid-cooled systems as compute density increases.
Meta claims the Temple facility uses 32% less energy than industry standard and is 80% more water-efficient than the average data center. The company has targeted LEED Gold certification and invested $8 million in local public water and wastewater infrastructure improvements. Meta has set a target to return 5.2 million gallons annually to the local watershed by 2030. All energy consumption is matched with 100% clean and renewable energy; Meta has invested in more than 700 MW of new wind and solar generation capacity across Texas, supporting over 40 renewable energy projects in the state.
The project employed over 1,200 skilled trade workers at peak construction and will support approximately 100 permanent operational positions. Meta has distributed $1.7 million in grants to Bell County schools and nonprofits, including a recent $400,000 grant for AI and STEM learning labs spanning pre-K through 12th grade.
Temple represents one node in Meta's rapidly expanding U.S. data center footprint. The company is simultaneously developing a gigawatt-scale campus in Louisiana through a $27 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital and has boosted investment in its El Paso facility to $10 billion. Meta's 2026 capital expenditure guidance of $125-145 billion—raised from an earlier $115-135 billion range—reflects both higher component costs and additional data center spending to support future-year capacity, nearly double the $72.2 billion the company spent in 2025.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that Meta plans to build tens of gigawatts of data center capacity this decade and "hundreds of gigawatts or more over time," signaling the scale of infrastructure investment the company views as necessary for its AI ambitions.