EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) – The arrival of global tech giants — Meta, OpenAI, and Oracle — in the Borderland has sparked concerns and skepticism by some in the community.
There are concerns about whether the companies’ planned data centers will severely strain the region’s utility resources, and if the jobs they create will actually be filled by locals.
“People have a right to be concerned. These are massive projects. In other places, the older style data centers, they did use a lot of water. They did cause issues in the community, and what have you. These (data centers), I think, will be different because they are going into an industrial base. This industrial base was built for manufacturing and for production,” said Jerry Pacheco, president for the Border Industrial Association.
Project Jupiter is a massive AI-training data center that will be built by OpenAI and Oracle in Santa Teresa. It has a $165 billion price tag attached to it and is expected to produce at least 750 high-paying full-time jobs.
Project Jupiter is part of the much larger $500 billion Stargate Project, in which multiple tech companies are collaborating to build new AI infrastructure throughout the United States.
Meanwhile, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, will be building a new artificial intelligence center in Northeast El Paso. This AI data center and project will be much smaller than Project Jupiter. It will be backed by a $1.5 billion investment by Meta, and is expected to create 100 high-paying positions.
“I can only speak for us in Doña Ana County, and I had the same concerns. ‘How much water will you use? Electricity?” Pacheco said. He added, however, that his concerns over Project Jupiter’s impact on local utility resources were quelled by the systems that project officials said the center will equip.
According to project officials, Project Jupiter’s data center will run on self-supplied power from a microgrid that will be constructed on site. The data center will also use a “closed-loop” cooling system that will require a one-time water demand to fill it up, and recirculate that same water to remove heat from equipment.
Meta’s data center, on the other hand, will tap into El Paso Water’s watersheds and El Paso Electric’s power grid.
However, according to EP Water and project officials, this data center will also employ a closed-loop cooling system that will restore twice the amount of water it will use in operations to the local watershed. EPE officials also said Meta will cover the costs for the dedicated infrastructure and usage it requires so that consumption or rates do not negatively impact customers.
While both projects tout that they will generate new high-paying jobs, Pacheco did note that local universities will have to develop new training programs to produce the local talent to fill these positions.
“We have two great universities with great engineering programs. But we’re going to have to generate the jobs that the data centers need. To Project Jupiter’s credit, they’ve already done outreach to NMSU, local institutions here, and our association to help them find training programs. So we have a little bit of time, a couple of years here, to get our act together and get to a position where we’re directing local people to occupy these jobs,” Pacheco said.
Pacheco also addressed questions over why the projects cost so much and why they are moving forward rapidly.
“It’s not only the infrastructure to the site, it’s the building. It’s the horizontal and vertical infrastructure to build the data center. But what’s really expensive in data centers are the chips in the servers. You have to replace those every 4 to 6 years because a brand new chip comes out. So you’re constantly replacing these super expensive chips,” Pacheco said.
“There were also a lot of people who were concerned that this project was moving too fast in terms of being approved by Doña Ana County. I think maybe it did, but if you take the company’s standpoint, if you’ve got Oracle and OpenAI on the hook and they’re saying, ‘We got to get this done fast.’ You’ve got to move fast,” Pacheco said.
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