Meta Temple Data Center

Overview

The Grid-Connected Baseline

One owner, one user, grid power.

Meta Temple is a hyperscale AI data center on Industrial Boulevard in Temple, Bell County, on the I-35 corridor between Austin and Waco. Meta opened it on July 22, 2026: two buildings, more than 760,000 sq ft and more than $1.2B, with a third building under construction. Epoch AI estimates about 178 MW of IT load once the third building is finished.

It is the baseline against which the other Texas exemplars are measured. Meta owns the building and the chips, uses them for its own models and buys power from the ERCOT grid through Oncor. No on-site generation, no tenant layers, no private utility: what a hyperscale campus looked like before behind-the-meter power became the Texas default.

History

Torn Down and Rebuilt for AI

Temple is also where Meta changed its data center design. In 2022 it paused construction at several sites and redesigned for AI training. At Temple the original H-shaped hall was already partly built; Meta demolished it in April 2023 and started over with buildings designed for the power density and cooling of AI hardware. JE Dunn, Meta's long-time builder, is general contractor of record for the redesign.

1. April 2022Land clearing begins on Industrial Boulevard
2. Early 2023A conventional H-shaped Meta hall is partly built
3. April 2023Meta demolishes it mid-construction and restarts with an AI-optimized design for higher power density and cooling
4. July 22, 2026Meta opens the campus: two buildings, more than 760,000 sq ft and more than $1.2B
5. 2026A third building under construction; a state filing lists completion at the end of September 2026

The supplier ring

The Meta Temple Supplier Ring

Each supplier placed by distance from Temple and what it supplies.

• United States
• Europe
• Japan
• Korea
• China
• Taiwan and other

The ring maps 51 suppliers. Only four are named for Temple: JE Dunn and Rosendin Electric for construction, Oncor for the substation and the City of Temple for water and wastewater. Local diesel and long-haul fiber are generic supply paths. The rest are the standard hyperscale stack, from TSMC-built NVIDIA GPUs and Meta's own MTIA chips to the three HBM makers, the server builders and the cooling and switchgear makers. Those are shown as outlined dots: plausible for any Meta AI campus, not confirmed for this one.

That makes Temple's ring a consumption ring. Suppliers ship equipment in and leave; little of it locates near Temple because of the campus. The contrast is Giga Texas or Starbase, where suppliers set up nearby.

Shared across anchors

Suppliers Shared With Other Texas Anchors

Because its ring is the generic hyperscale stack, Meta Temple overlaps most with the other AI campuses: Fermi America 22, Stargate Abilene 14, Tesla Giga Texas 12. The switchgear and transformer makers (ABB, Eaton, Hitachi Energy, Schneider Electric, Siemens Energy) recur in nearly every ring.

Constraints

Power and Water

Power is the limit on further growth. A grid-connected campus waits in the ERCOT large-load queue and on Oncor transmission work; the newer exemplars avoid that wait by building their own generation. Meta says the site's use is matched with renewable energy from more than 40 Meta-backed Texas projects, but the electrons still come from the grid.

Water is secondary. Meta put $8M into Temple's public water and wastewater system and funds a watershed project meant to return 5.2 million gallons a year by 2030.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• Meta Texas Compute
• AI Data Center Exemplars
• Stargate Abilene
• Fermi America Project Matador
• Texas LLM Compute Footprint
• Golden Dome Texas Corridor