Social Media Giant Files Plans to Spend $16 Billion This Year on Infrastructure
Social media giant Facebook is adding to its data center campus in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of plans to spend about $16 billion this year building out its infrastructure around the globe.
The Menlo Park, California-based social media behemoth opened the multibuilding, 1.5 million-square-foot data center campus in Fort Worth more than three years ago. Now Facebook is adding $6 million of utilities and underground space totaling 277,513 square feet, according to a state permit.
Facebook is also building an $800 million, nearly 1 million-square-foot data center in a Nashville suburb that should be up and running in 2023, and is expanding its data center east of Atlanta where it will eventually have 2.5 million square feet as part of a $1 billion investment. In total, Facebook has 13 data centers in the United States and 17 across the globe either built or underway, according to the company’s website.
Facebook trimmed its budget for data center construction this year to $16 billion from a previous range of $17 billion to $19 billion after having to stop construction in some places because of the pandemic, according to earnings statements. All of Facebook’s data centers use 100% renewable energy.
Construction on the expansion in Fort Worth is expected to begin in November, and be finished by the end of September 2022, according to the state permit. Facebook did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Facebook’s Fort Worth data center campus at AllianceTexas, a 26,000-acre master-planned, mixed-use community, is the largest data center in Texas, said Curt Holcomb, an executive vice president in JLL’s Dallas office and a co-leader of the brokerage firm’s data center solutions group.
“It’s the biggest data center I’ve seen in my career,” Holcomb said in an interview. “They have a lot of good infrastructure, power, water and fiber at AllianceTexas, which is a big reason why they ended up there. Dallas-Fort Worth is also one of the major data center markets, not only in the United States, but in the world.”
Facebook isn’t the only hyperscale data center user betting on the Dallas-Fort Worth region, with Google building a big data center campus near Dallas, which is being developed as part of the search engine’s larger $13 billion national expansion.
Facebook’s continued data center expansion in the North Texas region could inspire other hyperscale users or other data center tenants to follow suite, Holcomb said.
“They obviously know what they are doing,” he added. “This could be trendsetting.”
By Candice Carlislem, CoStar News
Central Commercial Group 