Dive Brief:
- Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced a construction pause for its new $800 million data center in Temple, Texas, in order to “change the design,” according to an email sent to Construction Dive from Meta spokesperson Melanie Roe. Kansas City-based general contractor J.E. Dunn broke ground on the project in the spring.
- The 900,000-square-foot facility was part of Meta’s data center push earlier this year. The Menlo Park, California-based company has invested more than $16 billion total in U.S. data center construction since 2010.
- Along with the construction pause in Texas, Meta also confirmed last week it has halted two data center projects in Odense, Denmark, according to Reuters.
Dive Insight:
Meta also launched $800 million data center projects in Kansas City, Missouri, and Kuna, Idaho, earlier this year. Those facilities bring the company’s footprint to more than 20 data centers worldwide.
Meta, along with other U.S.-based tech companies, announced widespread job cuts in November. That bleeding in the tech sector raised concern that construction activity could slow for hyperscale data center projects from tech giants like Meta, Twitter and Amazon.
While that remains to be seen, a slowdown in hyperscale data center construction should not affect the pace of data center construction overall, said Richard Branch, chief economist at Dodge Construction Network. He said Dodge remains bullish on where data center construction will be both this year and next year during a recent Dodge webinar.
Nevertheless, demand for colocation data centers — facilities that rent space to third parties — remains stronger than ever, said Danny Horton, senior project manager of the data center division at PCL Construction’s Seattle office.
Horton told Construction Dive that he expects the same steady growth within the data center industry over the next three years due to an “unwavering demand for data and cloud storage.”
“There is too much demand for these structures,” said Horton. “And while the layoffs have hit the industry hard, new opportunities continue to arise, and we’ll keep seeing momentum and growth for years.”
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