A rendering depicts three new data center buildings, an administration building and a warehouse being built at Meta’s Eagle Mountain Data Center campus. As part of the expansion, the company has also made major commitments to Eagle Mountain schools and other organizations. (Courtesy Meta)
Social media giant Meta has announced a major expansion its Eagle Mountain Data Center.
Full details haven’t been released, but the company said the new buildings will use closed-loop liquid cooling systems with dry cooling for its massive computer arrays, assuaging public concerns about water usage in the desert state.
“With this expansion, we are increasing our investment in Utah to more than $3 billion and will support more than 1,200 construction workers at the peak of construction, as well as more than 300 jobs at the data center once completed,” the company said in a Sept. 14 release.
Meta uses the Eagle Mountain facility to power traffic and infrastructure for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other Meta family apps and services. The company said the site is designed to be supported by 100 percent renewable energy from local Utah solar projects. The new facilities will add more than 1.7 gigawatts of computing power and will support a 600 megawatt-hour battery storage system.
Approval for the expansion was already being worked through Eagle Mountain’s government process in 2025, well ahead of recent uproar over data center development in Utah, particularly a proposal in Box Elder County for a massive center. The city approved a development agreement with Meta in October 2025, allowing expansion onto property immediately south of the existing campus.
Eagle Mountain subsequently created Sweetwater Industrial Park No. 4, a 567-acre community reinvestment area specifically for the Meta expansion, according to minutes of the Eagle Mountain City Council. When Meta publicized the expansion earlier this month, most of the governmental approval work had already occurred.
Meta broke ground on the original Eagle Mountain campus in 2018 and the site went live in 2021. The initial installation was announced at 1 million square feet at a cost of $750 million. Meta added 500,000 square feet in 2019, 900,000 square feet in 2021 and two more buildings totaling 2 million square feet in 2022.
Construction and expansion work is already underway, according to Meta’s announcement. The expansion calls for three new data center buildings, an administration building and a warehouse south of the existing campus.
As part of Meta’s $1 billion Future is for Everyone Fund commitment to invest directly in U.S. communities where Meta owns and operates data centers, the company will continue its Eagle Mountain contributions. Included are an additional $450,000 grant to the city for construction of the Walden Park Astronomy Park. The center will feature seven telescopes, a retractable roof and year-round STEM education, community programming and public stargazing.
Meta will also spend $600,000 to acquire three acres for a future elementary school in partnership with Lake Mountain School District, will commit $1.5 million to the Lake Mountain Education Foundation and make an ongoing annual contribution of $50,000 to support initiatives that directly enhance student learning experiences, including early childhood literacy. Prior to the new commitments, Meta has contributed more than $6.2 million to local schools and organizations, it said in its release.
The closed-loop cooling system Meta plans to use in its new facilities is a sealed, self-contained setup that recirculates a fixed volume of coolant to absorb and remove heat from high-temperature hardware without exposing the fluid to the outside environment. It uses no water, unlike earlier data center cooling systems that required large volumes of water to cool computer components.
Meta said the new buildings will use “no operational water in the cooling system. Water used onsite will be limited to domestic uses, fire protection and equipment maintenance. Our continued annual operational water use is projected to be less than one typical golf course in the region.”
Meta said that rather than using local water resources, it has invested in area water restoration projects that have returned more than 726 million gallons of water to the local watershed, including the Provo River Flow Restoration project, Hobble Creek Flow Restoration and a partnership with Eagle Mountain. A portion of the water used to cool Meta’s older servers has been diverted to irrigate Cory Wride Memorial Park in Eagle Mountain.
Meta has more than 30 self-built data center campuses in operation and in development around the world and is targeting tens of gigawatts of new computing power within the next decade. The company is also a major leaser of third-party data centers and cloud capacity.
