Dive Brief:
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Construction began Tuesday on Facebook’s $1 billion data center in North Fort Worth, TX, after months of rumors about which city would get the social media giant's latest massive complex.
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The 110-acre site will include three, 250,000-square-foot buildings. Facebook, which began building its own data centers six years ago, has projected the first building will open late next year. The center will be operated solely by wind power, which the firm will buy from a 202-megawatt, 17,000-acre wind to be built about 100 miles from the city.
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The Fort Worth data center will not create a large number of positions, but they are expected to be well-paying jobs. The Oregon data center has 130 employees in two buildings and upwards of 150 employees are at a data center in North Carolina.
Dive Insight:
Facebook is known for tough negotiating, and reportedly was considering as many as 220 cities for the new data center. Until this week, few knew that the firm had selected Fort Worth.
To win the massive project, Fort Worth and Tarrant County offered up millions of dollars worth of tax incentives —reportedly more than for any prior deal—despite the low number of jobs Facebook will create once construction finishes.
During building, however, the project could create thousands of construction jobs, and is expected to generate millions of dollars of tax revenue each year because of the value of the equipment on site. Plus, officials have said Facebook’s presence in the city is likely to attract other businesses to the area.
