Facebook expands its massive Fort Worth data center, expects to invest $1.5 billion
Facebook is expanding its massive data center in far north Fort Worth once again, bringing the total to more than 2.6 million square feet and $1.5 billion in investment at the campus.
About 150 people work at the data center, which stores and processes posts from the social media site.
Facebook announced plans to add about 170,000 square feet to the center this week with construction starting immediately. It should be finished in 2022.
The addition is part of the social media giant’s global data center infrastructure and will serve as what Facebook calls “cold storage,” the company said in a statement. Like other data centers on the campus, it will store posts and photos from the site that are older or that users accesses less often.
“Fort Worth has been a great location for our data center which helped make our decision to add this facility,” the statement read.
Expansion of the data center has been near constant since construction started in 2015. The build had more than 1,200 construction workers on site at peak, according to Facebook.
Facebook filed construction paperwork with the state to continue expansion at the AllianceTexas data center in September.
The Star-Telegram reported in March, 2019 that the city of Fort Worth had approved incentives for Facebook, in partnership with nearby QTS Data Center, to invest $150 million at the data campus near Park Vista Boulevard and Texas 170. About $100 million of that is in the data center’s servers.
Facebook data centers typically employ few people with mid-range salaries.
The incentive package approved last year, which involved a 20% property tax break, included a minimum of four jobs with an average wage of $43,992.
On Twitter Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price celebrated the latest expansion.
“Facebook continues to be an incredible community partner and we are thrilled to see them continually invest in Fort Worth,” she said in the tweet.
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 12:21 PM.
