Social media firm Meta is expanding its in-development data center campus in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we are expanding the Montgomery Data Center campus with two new buildings, bringing the campus footprint to nearly 1.3 million square feet (120,774 sqm),” the company said on Facebook. “This expansion almost doubles our investment for this campus, increasing it to more than $1.5 billion. Together with our Huntsville Data Center, Meta data centers in Alabama will now represent a more than $3bn investment in the state.”

Meta first announced plans to develop in Montgomery County in May 2024. The site’s first facility is expected to be live at the end of 2026. Renderings suggest at least four buildings are currently planned. The company said the new campus will be optimized for its AI workloads.

The facility is located across from Hyundai’s automotive assembly plant off Interstate 65 and will join Meta’s other Alabama data center campus 190 miles north in Huntsville, a previous investment worth $1.5bn that launched in 2018.

The social media firm said it is bringing 227MW of renewable energy projects online in Alabama.

Meta has around 30 data center campuses live or in development, with more in the pipeline, including plans for gigawatt-scale developments. The majority of its footprint is within the US. It is also a major lessee of facilities. Meta is building out at such a pace that the company is placing IT hardware in large temporary tents in some locations.

Meta paused development of around a dozen data centers in late 2022 as part of a "rescoping" of its designs to better cater to GPUs and liquid cooling. It has since resumed its build-out with the updated design. The company recently said that its first data centers with AI-optimized designs are slated to come online in 2026.