Reports: $1B Facebook Data Center Project Underway in Texas

Facebook is undertaking a $1 billion data center project in Fort Worth, Texas, state governor Greg Abbott’s office confirmed, according to the Dallas Business Journal. The project will consist of 750,000 square feet across several buildings.

Several local media outlets reported the governor said yesterday that he would be attending “the groundbreaking ceremony for a new Facebook data center.” The project is hidden under the name Winners LLC.

The Fort Worth data center project was first linked to Facebook via documents filled with the state in May, according to Dallas Morning News. Those documents revealed the planning team working on the project was the same companies behind Facebook’s $300 million data center in Des Moines, Iowa.

The Fort Worth data center site is next to a cluster of enterprise data centers from Blue Cross Blue Shield, AIG, and Citigroup.

Facebook currently has four data centers. Its US data centers are located in Oregon, North Carolina, and Iowa. It also leases data centers from wholesale providers in the US. It’s European data center is in Luleå, Sweden, and the company is also reportedly considering a data center in Ireland. The data centers support Facebook’s 1.5 billion users worldwide

Fort Worth recently approved financial incentives for the 110-acre data center project planned in the Alliance Texas development near Interstate 35W. The incentive package is worth up to $147 million, reported the Star-Telegram. Tarrant County commissioners also approved a 10-year tax abatement.

It has been a big year for Facebook data center expansion. In addition to planned projects, it continues to consume an enormous amount of wholesale data center space. In May, DuPont Fabros Technology revealed the social network signed up for another 7.5 megawatts in its Ashburn, Virginia, campus.

The Dallas-Fort Worth region has a bustling data center market. Rich in fiber-optic infrastructure, the area is a key internet hub. It is the birthplace of several of the biggest hosting and cloud providers in the world, such as Rackspace and IBM’s SoftLayer.