Meta has officially brought its data center in Temple, Texas, online, marking the completion of a facility that required more than four years from initial announcement to operations and represented a USD 1.2 billion investment by the company.

A Long Road to Launch

Meta announced that the Temple facility had commenced operations and was serving live traffic. Plans for the site were first shared more than four years ago, with construction beginning in spring 2022.

The project did not proceed without interruption, however. By December 2022, construction was paused as Meta began redesigning its data centers to accommodate artificial intelligence workloads.

Work resumed in October 2023 before the facility ultimately reached operational status.

Gary Demasi, Meta's Vice President of data center development and strategy, noted in a LinkedIn post that the Temple facility is the first to go live with Meta's new AI-optimized data center design, marking the site as a milestone in the company's broader infrastructure strategy.

Scale and Footprint

The Temple data center sits on 393 acres of land off NW H K Dodgen Loop and Industrial Blvd. When completed, the facility was planned to span approximately 900,000 square feet, or roughly 83,600 square meters.

The site represents Meta's second data center in Texas. The company's first Texas facility, located in Fort Worth, spans 2.6 million square feet and was brought online in 2017 after construction began in 2015, making the Temple campus a considerably different undertaking both in size and in purpose.

At its peak, construction at the Temple site employed around 1,200 workers.

With operations now underway, the facility supports approximately 100 ongoing operational roles.

AI-First Infrastructure Design

The significance of the Temple facility extends beyond its physical scale. The construction pause in late 2022 was directly tied to Meta's decision to rethink its data center architecture to better serve artificial intelligence workloads.

That redesign work informed the final configuration of the Temple site, making it the first location where the resulting AI-optimized design has gone live.

This positions the facility as a template of sorts for how Meta intends to build and operate infrastructure as artificial intelligence demands continue to shape the company's technical requirements.

Water and Energy Commitments

Meta has emphasized several environmental commitments tied to the Temple facility. The data center uses a water-efficient closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that the company says will use zero water for the majority of the year.

In addition, Meta is supporting a local water conservation and restoration project that returns 5.2 million gallons of water back into the watershed.

On the energy side, the data center's electricity use is matched with 100 percent clean energy.

Since beginning construction at the site, Meta has signed a 240-megawatt solar power purchase agreement in Texas.

Temple's Growing Data Center Profile

The opening of Meta's facility arrives as Temple, a city in Bell County located between Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth region, attracts growing attention from the data center industry.

Meta's activation of its Temple site adds to the profile of a market that is seeing increasing investment from multiple operators.