The Data Center Decade on the Border

Three hyperscale projects now sit inside a single metro airshed and a single stressed watershed.

El Paso did not drift into the data center business. It chose it, on specific dates, through specific votes. On December 5, 2023, under then Mayor Oscar Leeser, the Council unanimously approved economic development agreements with Wurldwide LLC, a Meta affiliate, for a site in Northeast El Paso. Of the representatives serving today, only two were in the room for that vote: District 8's Chris Canales and District 6's Art Fierro.¹⁹ Meta broke ground in October 2025, and in March 2026 announced it was raising its investment more than sixfold.⁷⁹

CORRIDOR follows three developments across the El Paso and Santa Teresa corridor. They differ in jurisdiction and disclosure, which is exactly why they belong in one frame.

City staff have estimated that powering these facilities would raise El Paso's carbon dioxide emissions by about twenty one percent over a 2019 baseline.¹² The three projects share air, water, transmission, and a construction workforce. No single permitting process sees all three at once. CORRIDOR exists to hold them in one view.

The headline is investment and jobs. The contract is an abatement and a floor of fifty.

Strip away the announcements and read the instrument. Under the 2023 Chapter 380 agreement, if Meta invests at least 800 million dollars, the City abates up to eighty percent of its property taxes for fifteen years. El Paso County layered on its own abatement. The El Paso Times estimated the combined package could be worth up to 110 million dollars.² On top of that, the City allocated up to 5 million dollars in economic development funds to help defray the cost of the project's connection to U.S. Highway 54.²²

The gap between the last two figures is the whole accountability problem in one line. Meta says it will employ more than three hundred people once the campus is complete, and more than four thousand at peak construction. The agreement obligates it to fifty.³⁵ A promise is not a covenant. When the abatement is locked for fifteen years and the binding employment floor is fifty, the public's leverage to convert the larger number into a guarantee has already been spent.

There is a real point on the booster side that honest accounting has to keep. The parcel was previously city owned land, managed by El Paso Water and the Public Service Board, transferred to the City for industrial development before Meta ever appeared. As public land it generated no property tax at all. So even an eighty percent abatement leaves the remaining twenty percent, plus the land base and sales tax on construction materials, as revenue the rolls did not have before.¹⁵ The deal is not free money for nothing. But that framing, public land versus private use, is also the trap, and we return to it in Section 06.

Permitted for 1.5 million gallons a day. Estimated at 400,000. The distance between those numbers is the argument.

El Paso Water supplies cooling water to the Meta site under an agreement permitting up to 1.5 million gallons per day. The utility's own estimate of actual average use is far lower, around 400,000 gallons per day, roughly 146 million gallons a year. CEO John Balliew has been precise about why: below 86 degrees the facility uses essentially nothing for cooling, and only a 117 degree day would push it toward the permitted maximum. At 400,000 gallons a day the data center would not crack the utility's top ten customers; it lands around number eleven, behind schools and hospitals.²⁰²⁵

Balliew has stressed that Meta pays the highest large user rate with no special rate and no rebate, and that the utility's 2026 budget and roughly twelve percent rate increase were not driven by the data center.²³ Meta, for its part, has pledged to restore two hundred percent of the water it consumes through Rio Grande watershed projects, micro irrigation upgrades for pecan orchards, and partnerships to bring running water to colonias, projects it expects to restore more than 177 million gallons a year once implemented.²⁶ Taken at face value, that is a genuine commitment, and a better one than most host communities secure.

Two facts keep the concern alive anyway. First, this is a city that in the same window suffered a 36 inch water main rupture leaving roughly 100,000 Northeast and Central residents without adequate pressure, under a boil water notice.²³ Reliability, not just supply, is the lived issue. Second, and more important, the water figures above describe the original 1.5 billion dollar facility. Neither Meta nor the utility has released an updated forecast for the 10 billion dollar, one gigawatt campus, which observers expect could climb toward a million gallons a day.²² The number the public is debating is the old number.

A gigawatt of constant demand does not come from the existing grid. It comes from a new gas plant built to order.

To serve Meta, El Paso Electric is building a dedicated facility: a roughly 500 million dollar, 366 megawatt natural gas plant, developed with the generator company Enchanted Rock and reported to use hundreds of small gas fired units.¹⁸²¹ That plant carries an air permit authorizing significant annual emissions, including on the order of 68 tons of nitrogen oxides, a precursor to the ozone El Paso already struggles with.¹⁸

Here the structure matters as much as the chemistry. Meta states that it pays the full cost of serving the data center, plans to add more than 5,000 megawatts of clean energy to the Texas grid, and intends to match one hundred percent of its electricity use.⁴ Opponents, reading El Paso Electric's filings, counter that the plant's cost is structured to shift to all ratepayers after an initial period Meta covers, and they note that the original agreement explicitly stated Meta "shall not be obligated to pursue" the solar and alternative energy it had floated.⁹²¹ A pledge to match clean energy and a contractual release from having to build it can coexist on the same page. Which one governs in 2030 is the open question.

Accountability work earns its authority by stating the other side at full strength. Here it is, both ways.

Both columns are true at once. That is not indecision. It is the actual shape of the problem: a deal can deliver real revenue and real jobs and still be a poor trade if the inputs it consumes were worth more in another use, and if the public never got to price them.

Net benefit does not hinge on how big the investment is. It hinges on how the contract is built.

There is a useful contrast in the public record. In jurisdictions that tax the servers and equipment heavily rather than abating them, data centers have become large net contributors to local budgets, because the taxable value sits in the constantly refreshed hardware, not the land. El Paso took the other path: abate the improvements, keep the land base. Whether that path pays depends entirely on enforceable floors, escalators, and benefit terms, the very things a fifty job minimum does not provide.

The mechanism that lets a weak structure get signed is information asymmetry. El Paso's history of non disclosure on these projects, and the still unreleased water forecast for the expanded campus, mean the public consistently debates last year's numbers while the operative terms sit in instruments few have read. The developer always knows the real figures. The community rarely does, until the vote is behind it.

CORRIDOR's role follows from this directly. Keep the executed terms in daylight, track the fifty job floor against the three hundred job promise as the campus opens, publish the campus scale water forecast the moment it exists, and hold the community benefit framework to enforceable language rather than aspiration. Accountability here is not opposition. It is making the trade legible enough that the public can judge it on the real numbers. The public record behind this analysis is live: you can ask the CORRIDOR record directly.

Seven indicators will tell you whether the bet is paying, long before the rhetoric does.