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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has selected Redwood City, California-based contractor DPR Construction to build its $1 billion data center in Mesa, Arizona, the contractor told Construction Dive.
The project, first announced in August 2021, is a five-building campus development spanning more than 2.5 million square feet of data center and administration space. The campus, which DPR hopes to complete by 2026, will use 12,000 tons of steelthey incorporate more than 600 miles of framing studs and use 700 acres of drywall, according to a social media post from Mesa Mayor John Giles.
Once complete, the Mesa data center will be one of the most advanced and energy- and water-efficient data centers in the world, according to Meta. The site will be supported by 100% renewable energy and is slated for LEED Gold certification by the US Green Building Council.
DPR previously delivered the first Meta development at the Prineville data center in Oregon, followed by the Forest City data center in North Carolina and the Luleå data center in Sweden. Some of its current projects include other Meta data centers in Texas, Virginia and Tennessee.
Booming Phoenix Market
The Phoenix region has suffered a project boom recentlyspecifically in the data center manufacturing and construction space.
Some of the region’s biggest projects, in addition to Meta’s $1 billion data center in nearby Mesa, include a Google’s $600 million data center and two $20 billion worth of semiconductor factories in chandler These massive projects, which are beginning to press steel supply for smaller contractorsthey continue to target cities like Phoenix because of their low risk of natural disasters.
Nationally, data center construction demand remains strong, although some signs of slowing down have emerged Still, data center construction activity in primary US markets rose 25% year-over-year to a record 2,288 megawatts of capacity in the first half of 2023, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate services firm based in Dallas.
