Facebook and New Mexico’s governor, Susana Martinez, jointly announced last week that the $250 million project will be built in Los Lunas, New Mexico. Martinez said the 510,000-square-foot project has the potential for multiple future phases that would create more jobs and investment.
Utah has lost out to a site in New Mexico for a Facebook data center following bickering about the pros and cons of having the facility in West Jordan.
Facebook and New Mexico’s governor, Susana Martinez, jointly announced last week that the $250 million project will be built in Los Lunas, New Mexico. Martinez said the 510,000-square-foot project has the potential for multiple future phases that would create more jobs and investment.
“Long-term, the project has the potential to attract other high-tech companies to the state and transform New Mexico into a hub for data center activity,” she said in making the announcement.
“We’re thrilled to have found a home in New Mexico and embark on this new partnership with the state of New Mexico and the village of Los Lunas,” Tom Furlong, vice president of infrastructure at Facebook, said in a prepared statement.
The attempt to land the data center was called Project Discus in Utah, with state officials stepping around the company name when discussing it.
West Jordan City Council had voted to support an initial local property tax incentive package of $250 million over 20 years for the project, but Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and the Salt Lake County Council rejected it and the Utah State Board of Education voted to approve only the first phase and cap the tax incentives at $100 million. Much of the opposition centered on the large size of the incentive bringing in only about 100 jobs and concerns about potentially large water usage by the center.
At that point, West Jordan city officials deemed the effort dead, saying it had ended negotiations, but a day later said further negotiations were underway, noting that “this is too good of an opportunity for Utah to pass up.”
After last week’s announcement, Val Hale, executive director of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, held out hope that Utah still might be the site of a future Facebook project.
“Business recruitment is a competitive endeavor and we congratulate New Mexico on winning this project,” Hale said in a prepared statement. “The Governor’s Office of Economic Development believes in attracting the right projects, for the right communities and is committed to facilitating processes that expand and diversify our economy. We are optimistic that Facebook and its innovative peers in technology will recognize our strengths as a state, and we would welcome a partnership in the future. Utah is and will continue to be a great place to do business.”
In a prepared statement, West Jordan Mayor Kim Rolfe said the city had been “hopeful” that it could reach a revised agreement to land the project and said “this ends any current discussions for West Jordan to welcome Facebook to the state of Utah.”
“I am proud of the tremendous effort the West Jordan City Council and staff expended in order to attract a Fortune 500 company to our state and community,” Rolfe said. “We are obviously disappointed in the result, but wish Facebook, Los Lunas and the state of New Mexico tremendous success on their project.”
Construction on the project in Los Lunas is expected to begin later this year — Ken Patchett, director of data center operations for the company’s West region, said ground will be broken in October — and operations are expected to be online in late 2018.
“The process for finding a location for a new data center takes years, and it’s an important one because these communities become our homes. In our search, we look for great partnerships with the local community, a strong pool of local talent for construction and long-term operations staff, and access to clean and renewable energy. We found all of this in Los Lunas, and we’re excited to join the community there,” Patchett said in a statement on Facebook.
Facebook said it selected New Mexico in part because of the state’s competitive business climate, strong workforce, commitment to infrastructure investment, and opportunities for renewable energy development.
Martinez and other economic development officials from New Mexico first visited with company executives in August of 2015. “When we first sat down with Facebook executives 13 months ago, we weren’t even on their radar,” Martinez said. “But we made a strong case and laid out how competitive we have become. Two months later, we got the call and went straight to work.”