Meta's data center in Temple, Texas, is now serving traffic.

The company revealed yesterday, July 22, that the site had officially commenced operations, more than four years after plans for the site were first shared.

Located on 393 acres of land off NW H K Dodgen Loop and Industrial Blvd., the data center was planned to span approximately 900,000 square feet (83,600 sqm) when completed, with construction beginning in Spring of 2022.

However, by December 2022, construction had been paused at the site as the company began redesigning its data centers for artificial intelligence workloads. Works resumed in October 2023. In a LinkedIn post, Meta's VP of data center development and strategy, Gary Demasi, noted that the facility is the first to go live with Meta's new AI-optimized data center design.

In total, Meta says it has invested some $1.2 billion in the data center, which is its second facility in Texas. The company started work on the 2.6 million sq ft (241,545 sqm) facility in Fort Worth in 2015 and brought it online in 2017.

At peak construction, around 1,200 workers were employed on the site, with 100 ongoing operational roles now in place.

The company has said that the data center uses a water-efficient closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that will use zero water for a majority of the year, and is supporting a local water conservation and restoration project that puts 5.2 million gallons of water back into the watershed.

Additionally, the data center's electricity use is matched with 100 percent clean energy. Since commencing construction, the company has signed a 240MW solar PPA in Texas.

Temple is a city in Bell County, Texas, located between Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth regions. Rowan is currently developing a 300MW data center in the city, and Atlas Development has also filed for a 12-building data center campus nearby.