EDD secretary-designate: Companies are reaching out about building data centers in New Mexico

Data centers could be an economic boon to New Mexico and “really uplift our rural communities,” Economic Development Secretary-designate Rob Black told a legislative committee on Friday.

Black’s presentation to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee comes as technology companies like Meta Inc. and Stargate — a coalition of funders that includes OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX — have announced plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

“I probably have a dozen companies that are looking to put data centers in New Mexico today,” Black said.

Which companies are interested in the state and where they would build was not immediately clear.

“The data center inquiries are in various stages and focused on potential sites throughout New Mexico,” Bruce Krasnow, a spokesperson with the state Economic Development Department, wrote in an email. “It would be inappropriate for the EDD to comment on specifics regarding the discussions with different companies at this time.”

New Mexico has about 10 data centers currently, according to the online research tool Data Center Map, which tracks data centers throughout the United States. The majority — six — are in the Albuquerque metro area, with the most notable being Meta’s Los Lunas campus, which includes roughly half a dozen buildings.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week said the company plans to spend as much as $65 billion, driven in part by AI and expanding the company’s data centers — which house the processing power for its apps such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Part of that spending includes the potential expansion of Meta’s Los Lunas campus, one of about two dozen in the U.S. the company runs, where it will add “two new state-of-the-art Gen AI data center buildings,” said Village of Los Lunas Senior Economic Developer Victoria Archuleta.

Archuleta said Meta, whose subsidiary Greater Kudu LLC received an approved resolution from the Los Lunas Village Council for industrial revenue bonds for the proposed expansion, would spend more than $800 million on the expansion, including construction and equipment costs in a buildout expected to last two to three years.

The company still has time to decide if it will move forward with the project. Meta has already invested more than $2 billion since first breaking ground on the data center in 2016 and now employs hundreds of workers, according to a company fact sheet.

“The Village of Los Lunas is one of the fastest growing communities in New Mexico,” Archuleta said. “We equate our current growth rate to what Rio Rancho experienced with Intel.”

Democratic State Rep. Sarah Silva, who represents parts of Doña Ana and Otero counties, told Black on Friday that she supports the expansion of data centers in New Mexico, but that she has concerns about increases to utility bills for households near where some may be built.

“I’d want to make sure that we’re not nickel and diming our residents, who are benefiting in one way, but then also having to pay out of pocket in another way,” she said. “We’re becoming more arid in New Mexico, and so making sure that we have contingencies as data centers use a lot of water.”

Black responded that modern data centers use closed-loop water systems — a liquid-cooling apparatus where water is circulated through a closed loop, absorbing heat from servers and returning them to a chiller to be cooled again.

“Many of these data centers want to build renewable energy to support those,” Black added. “As it relates to increasing rates, typically, when an investor-owned utility gets a large-scale economic development project, it actually spreads the cost of infrastructure needs to a bigger pot. So, it tends to reduce the costs and impact on residential customers.”