Meta, the parent company of Facebook, 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 greenfield development of a five-building campus encompassing over 2.5 million square feet of data center and admin space. The campus, which DPR expects to complete in 2026, will use 12,000 tons of steel, incorporate over 600 miles of framing studs and employ 700 acres of drywall, according to a social media post from Mesa Mayor John Giles.
Once complete, the Mesa data center will be among 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 the U.S. Green Building Council has slated it for LEED Gold certification.
DPR previously delivered Meta’s first greenfield 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 undergone a project boom recently, specifically in the manufacturing and data center construction space.
Some of the region’s largest projects, in addition to Meta’s $1 billion data center in nearby Mesa, include a $600 million Google data center and two semiconductor fabs worth $20 billion in Chandler. These massive projects, which are beginning to exert pressure on sourcing steel for smaller contractors, continue to target cities like Phoenix due to its low natural disaster risk.
On a nationwide level, demand for data center construction remains strong, although some signs of deceleration have emerged. Still, data center construction activity in U.S. primary markets increased 25% year-over-year to a record high capacity of 2,288 megawatts in the first half of 2023, according to CBRE, a Dallas-based commercial real estate services firm.