EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) – Economic experts say Meta’s — Facebook’s parent company — move to build a new artificial intelligence center in El Paso will spur continued investment from big tech companies and other industries that may transform the region’s economy.
“When you are home to a Meta facility, that brings all sorts of other types of positive global branding opportunities. You think of Meta’s high-profile presence in a number of high-growth industries, like health care, banking, e-commerce and film and multimedia. That makes the El Paso region now a player in all of those industries,” said John Boyd, an economic development expert and principal of The Boyd Company Inc., a consulting firm offering corporate site selection services.
Boyd said the economic boost that the Meta AI center will produce will include “enormous” new tax revenue, and that it will serve as a catalyst for new real estate development activity, including new housing, hotels, retail and commercial spaces.
“It’s an economic development asset. This is an FDI (foreign direct investment) recruiting tool for tech companies to locate in the El Paso region,” Boyd said.
Meta’s center is expected to create more than 1,800 construction jobs at “peak development,” and 100 operational positions once it is up and running.
Meta’s announcement came on the heels of two other major tech centers that were approved to be built in the borderland.
Last month, Doña Ana County officials approved an ordinance authorizing the issuance and sale of up to $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds for Project Jupiter, a massive AI-training data center set to be built in Santa Teresa in the coming months. The project is estimated to create at least 750 new full-time, high-paying positions.
As well, back in June, the City of Socorro announced that Wiwynn Corp., a Taiwanese tech company, will invest $152 million to develop a new manufacturing and testing facility in the city. This project is expected to create over 500 high-paying jobs.
Tom Fullerton, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Texas at El Paso, said the immediate economic impact of these projects may not be as pronounced as people expect, but that they are likely to transform the region’s economy over time.
“These represent important advances for the regional economy. It’s not surprising that they’re occurring, and the early year impacts may not be as astounding as a lot of people anticipate, but they are welcome additions toward the evolution of this region. They represent part of the wave of the future. There’s going to be more capital-intensive, technologically advanced business investments occurring all over the hemisphere. And El Paso and Santa Teresa are well-positioned to take advantage of that,” Fullerton said.
Fullerton also said that Meta’s AI center is a much smaller-scale project compared to the other projects and will therefore have a smaller immediate impact on the borderland’s economy.
“Typically, these data centers do not have a lot of worker requirements. They’re very capital-intensive, but not very labor-intensive,” Fullerton said. “There’s not going to be as big of an impact as some of the other investments that have occurred around the county, simply because the number of professionals that are going to be working there is going to be smaller. The impact will be more muted than what a lot of people might anticipate.”
Read: Read More