The steel frame of a massive data center rises from the Texas plains, a concrete symbol of Meta’s accelerating bet on artificial intelligence. The 1.5-million-square-foot facility, expected to be operational by 2026, is one of two major projects the company has underway in the United States. In Mesa, Arizona, a second data center measuring 1.1 million square feet is on track to complete construction later this year.
Together, the two sites represent a tangible commitment to building the physical backbone of Meta’s AI ambitions. The scale of that commitment is reflected in the company’s balance sheet.
Meta has announced $65 billion in capital expenditures for 2025, a 76 percent increase over the $37 billion it spent in 2024. The bulk of that spending is directed at artificial intelligence infrastructure, including server racks, cooling systems, and a fleet of graphics processing units. The company has ordered more than one million Nvidia chips for the year, including both the H100 and the upcoming B200 models.
Those processors are the computational engines that will train and deploy Meta’s Llama family of AI models.
Infrastructure as a Strategic Investment
Meta’s long-term AI strategy depends on securing enough compute power to train ever-larger models while also providing enough physical space to house the hardware. The numbers underscore the scale of the endeavor: $65 billion in a single year, more than half again what the company spent in the previous year. That investment buys more than chips; it buys the buildings, power systems, and cooling infrastructure needed to run them at industrial scale.
The company, originally founded as Facebook, Inc., rebranded in 2021 to reflect a broader focus beyond social media. The name change signaled a strategic shift toward building the metaverse and advancing emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence.
Today, that evolution is manifesting in hardware and energy investments that position Meta as an owner of the underlying systems powering its services, rather than a company that relies solely on external providers. For users, this push means faster, more capable tools for Meta’s products, while also influencing broader industry trends in computing and energy use. Major tech firms are now competing not just in software but in the physical backbone of digital innovation.
Powering the AI Boom
The energy demands of this infrastructure are staggering. By 2026, Meta’s data centers are projected to draw 10 gigawatts of electricity, up from 4 gigawatts in 2024. To feed that appetite, the company has struck renewable-energy partnerships with firms such as Ørsted and Invenergy. The partnerships are part of an effort to align the company’s growing power consumption with its stated environmental goals.
On the Q4 2024 earnings call held in January 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the logic plainly: “AI will be our biggest investment area for the foreseeable future.” That statement now reads as a promise the company is keeping at industrial scale. The energy projections underline the sheer magnitude of the build-out.
A 10-gigawatt load places Meta’s data center fleet among the largest industrial consumers of electricity in the United States. What to watch next: whether Meta can bring the Fort Worth facility online by 2026 as planned, and whether the renewable-energy partnerships will keep pace with the 10-gigawatt projection. The company is building at a speed that leaves little room for delay.
As the skeleton of the Fort Worth data center continues to rise, it serves as a reminder that the race for AI supremacy is being fought not only in software algorithms but in steel, concrete, and the electrons that power them.
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