Facebook to spend $1.6 billion constructing two U.S. data centers

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has launched two new data center projects in Texas and Missouri, for a combined cost of approximately $1.6 billion.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

The facility in Texas will total approximately 900,000 square feet, while the data center in Missouri will total nearly one million square feet.

Kansas City-based J.E. Dunn Construction Group and New York City-based Turner Construction are reported to be the general contractors for each project, respectively.

The Texas data center will be the company’s 21st data center worldwide, with 17 of those in the U.S. Facebook’s total investment in U.S. data center construction and operations is estimated at approximately $16 billion.

The building of data centers is one of the biggest trends in construction. A report by Insight Partners valued the international data center construction market at $43 billion, and predicted that it would rise to $92 billion by 2025.

“The fulfillment market is red-hot; ecommerce is red-hot; data centers are-red hot,” said Dr. Anirban Basu, chief economist with Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) last summer. “Modernizing and upgrading those buildings will be key [going forward].”

According to the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, the U.S. was home to approximately 3 million data centers, facilities that house servers and are integral to our information infrastructure, in 2014 – a number that’s increased over the past seven years.

In 2021, with companies such as Google and Amazon tallying so many, both large and small, there’s no official count, according to a recent report by marketing research company Accountability Information Management, Inc. (AIM).

AIM’s research also showed that there are plenty of opportunities to break into the data center construction market outside of the big-name tech companies.

“You’d think that when you say you want to penetrate the data center market, you’re always looking at Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but that’s not true,” said AIM president Jim Nowakowski. “Do you seek the volume owner or the almost-impossible-to-penetrate big boys? It’s amazing what you see when you look carefully at data.”