$Meta is building this data center from scratch on ~1,000 acres of land land it bought from the City of El Paso in 2023 for $9M. El Paso Electric has about 2.9 GW of total generation capacity serving ~460K customers, so a 1 GW Meta campus is nearly the size of the entire existing utility system, which is why they're building dedicated gas generation. The site selection logic appears to be cheap land, proximity to Meta's existing campuses in New Mexico and Arizona (Los Lunas, Mesa), and the ability to negotiate custom power arrangements with a smaller regional utility rather than fighting ERCOT interconnection queues in the Dallas/Austin corridor.
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