Austin-based Company Plans to Spend $165 Billion on New Mexico Data Center Campus Near El Paso
This story was originally published by EL PASO MATTERS
(While BorderPlex builds in Santa Teresa, Meta is advancing $800 million data center in Northeast El Paso)
by Diego Mendoza-Moyers, El Paso Matters – August 27, 2025
After a scene that could have been pulled out of the 2025 film “Eddington,” the Doña Ana Board of County Commissioners this week advanced a deal with an Austin-based firm that says it plans to invest an almost-inconceivable sum – $165 billion – to build an infrastructure campus that will house data centers in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.
Much like the movie’s mayor hyped a data center in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, Doña Ana commissioners at a Tuesday meeting touted the investment by BorderPlex Digital Assets that the company says will result in 750 permanent jobs locally and $300 million in direct payments to the county’s coffers.
The commission voted 4-1 Tuesday to advance the deal, and commissioners will take a final vote during a public hearing Sept. 19. District 4 Commissioner Susanna Chaparro voted against the measure.
“This sounds to be a wonderful thing for Doña Ana County, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this,” Chaparro said. “I would like more community engagement. … We, as a community, need to understand what will be happening in our county.”
The infrastructure campus, dubbed Project Jupiter, is planned to be just north of the port of entry in Santa Teresa, an unincorporated area near West El Paso.
To put into perspective how gargantuan a proposed $165 billion investment is, all of the property in El Paso County is collectively valued at about $95 billion, according to the El Paso Central Appraisal District. A $165 billion investment would be two-thirds of the inflation-adjusted spending by the United States on the Apollo project in the 1960s and 1970s that put men on the moon.
Lanham Napier, chairman and co-founder of BorderPlex Digital Assets, said the company will pay for its own electricity generation and storage resources to power the campus, which will feature four data center buildings. Hyperscale data centers house thousands of computer servers and hardware that run constantly to process and store huge amounts of data for big tech companies.
Napier said the campus’ water usage – one of the major questions surrounding the facility – will be “minimal” because it features a system that recycles water.
“We are now at a point in our technology development where we can develop these resources in a very sustainable, innovative way,” Napier told the board of commissioners.
“We look at water resources that’s required, it’s basically domestic water uses for the employees. So, 750 employees, that’s running dishwashers, running sinks, using facilities, using the toilet, that kind of stuff,” said Napier, a former chief executive of Rackspace, a San Antonio-based technology company. “So, the technology is advanced to where data centers run closed-loop systems. Water consumption is minimal.”
Only a handful of global technology companies – including Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Oracle and Microsoft – have the financial capacity to operate such a sprawling data center campus. The developers haven’t identified the eventual tenants of the data centers.
If commissioners approve the deal, Doña Ana County would issue so-called industrial revenue bonds, which the company would repay. BorderPlex Digital would transfer the land and equipment to the county so that Doña Ana County owns the project. Then, the county would lease it back to the company for a 30-year period.
That way, BorderPlex Digital could avoid paying property taxes. In exchange, the company said it would provide about $300 million in “payments in lieu of taxes” to the county over the term of the deal. After 30 years, the company’s shareholders would take ownership – not the county.
The $165 billion “is not a debt of the county,” said Chris Muirhead, an attorney who serves as bond counsel for Doña Ana County.
“It is not money that the county is providing to the company. It is not an obligation that the county will ever be asked to repay, nor is the county committing any of its revenues ever to repay it,” he said. “That number ties to what the company anticipates to be the investment – the capital investment – into the project.”
The vote Tuesday came after well over a dozen people spoke against the project and urged the commissioners to vote against the deal, although several people supported the project.
“This is going to be transformative for this community,” District 3 Commissioner Shannon Reynolds said. “One of the things that we insist on as part of this discussion is that … this data center is not going to have a negative impact on the water situation down in Santa Teresa and in Sunland Park. If it does, then, I promise you, we will be on top of it.”
Timeline, CRRUA questions linger
Part of the pushback Tuesday stemmed from the seemingly sudden nature of the deal with BorderPlex Digital. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the deal in February, but few details had emerged until the meeting Tuesday – and now the final vote is 23 days away.
“This is a project that’s going through very, very quickly,” Chaparro said. “I don’t think that I have had all of my questions answered to this point. And I think this community deserves the answers to the questions they may have.”
Others questioned whether the massive campus would truly employ a “closed-loop” system that uses little of the region’s groundwater. There’s also concerns about oversight by county commissioners.
Residents in southern Doña Ana County over the last two years have experienced a water crisis after mismanagement and numerous failures by the utility that covers Santa Teresa and Sunland Park – the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority – led to unsafe levels of arsenic entering household drinking water.
And caustic soda at a malfunctioning treatment plant also poured into the area’s water supply in late 2023, and customers experienced slimy, high-pH water at their homes.
Tests conducted by CRRUA under the utility’s new leadership have shown improved water quality with lower levels of arsenic in recent months. Still, members of the current county board of commissioners sat on CRRUA’s governing board during the period of cascading failures at the utility. Chaparro was chair of the utility’s board.
Earlier this year, Sunland Park announced it would develop its own municipal water utility while Doña Ana County officials said they would take over CRRUA’s assets outside of Sunland Park and create a new water provider for the area.
“It’s not a proven technology,” Daisy Maldonado, director of the advocacy group Empowerment Congress of Doña Ana County, said of the data centers’ water re-use system. “There’s just too much at risk in terms of the water that’s available for the people in” Sunland Park.
She said the company needs to provide more details of the closed-loop system technology to prove it works and doesn’t drain water resources from the area. And she expressed distrust of the county board of commissioners overseeing the project and its water usage.
“The continued message is, ‘Don’t worry, we’re taking care of it,’” Maldonado told El Paso Matters. “It’s not good enough, because we’ve already seen all the negative consequences when that happens.”
Maldonado said some of the payments from the company to the county’s coffers could, in theory, help fund water infrastructure improvements in Sunland Park and elsewhere in the county, but there’s no guarantee.
“There is a possibility for that, but where are the grand plans?” she said.
“This idea that ‘We’re going to be on top of it’ and somehow there’s going to be regulators around making sure, is poppycock,” she said. “They’re going to accept the checks and the money and they’re just going to let them do whatever they want.”
The Santa Teresa project would be one of the largest efforts to date by leading global tech companies to build data centers needed to provide the massive computing power for artificial intelligence.
Over the last year, Microsoft Corp. spent $64.5 billion on capital expenditures, and since 2020, the technology giant has averaged capital spending of about $36 billion annually across the company’s entire global footprint.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported capital spending of $52.5 billion last year. Meanwhile, Meta Platforms, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, spent $37.25 billion on capital in 2024.
So, BorderPlex Digital could spend more in Doña Ana County than the world’s largest technology companies have spent on capital investments in the last year combined – albeit over multiple years.
The technology company Oracle has also increased capital spending rapidly to build out data centers to support its cloud computing business. The Austin-based company reported capital spending of over $21 billion in its most recent fiscal year, compared with $22 billion in capital expenditures over the previous four years combined.
“We will build and operate more cloud infrastructure data centers than all of our cloud infrastructure competitors combined,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in June on the company’s most recent earnings call.
Meta building major data center in El Paso
Meta is moving forward with a data center in far Northeast El Paso after agreeing with the city to spend at least $800 million to build a facility that will employ 50 people. In exchange, the city gave Meta a 25-year property tax abatement and spent $12.5 million to improve a road near the data center site. That money came from an $80 million fund El Paso Electric paid the city in exchange for approval of the acquisition of the utility in 2020 by a J.P. Morgan-owned investment fund.
Meta’s investment here could reach as much $14 billion if it builds additional phases onto the campus.
Meta has said it will use air cooling systems to minimize water usage. Still, El Paso Water and Meta in late 2023 agreed to a water supply agreement that allows Meta to use as much as 750,000 gallons per day once it’s operational – and up to 1.5 million gallons daily if it adds phases to the project.
By comparison, the Marathon Petroleum refinery in Central El Paso uses about 1.1 million gallons of water per day. El Paso Electric uses almost 19 million gallons every day, according to El Paso Water.
El Paso Water supplies about 40 billion gallons of water annually, or about 110 million gallons per day on average.
New Mexico border highway
BorderPlex Digital’s project will be located adjacent to the new Border Connector highway that will connect to the Pete Domenici Highway and give drivers a more direct route into Sunland Park and then onto Interstate 10.
The state of New Mexico has sought to build the $150 million highway to allow for easier access from El Paso to the industrial parks near Santa Teresa; for now drivers in El Paso typically have to go north on Interstate 10, exit west at Artcraft Road and then head south on Pete Domenici Highway.
The area near the international crossing has seen major development, including the industrial parks near the Santa Teresa airport, as well as a major solar farm El Paso Electric has under construction nearby.
The utility will build another source of power generation to supply the new data center campus. When Lujan Grisham announced the data center project in February, El Paso Electric said it had worked “closely with BorderPlex Digital over the last two years to design the infrastructure required to support the project.”
“BorderPlex Digital and El Paso Electric have entered into agreements to power this hub of innovation,” the utility said in a news release.
The details of the agreement aren’t clear. But, Napier said the power supply deal will be “compliant” with the New Mexico Energy Transition Act, which requires utilities in the state to supply 50% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and 100% by 2045.
Who is BorderPlex Digital Assets?
Napier, chairman of the company behind the proposed project, is also chairman of BuildGroup, an investment firm in Austin he co-founded after leading Rackspace for eight years.
Miguel Fernandez, an El Paso businessman and CEO of the telecommunications company Flo Networks, is listed along with Napier on the “leadership” page of BorderPlex Digital’s website.
Napier said Tuesday that BorderPlex Digital is a “growth infrastructure company” that makes investments “to build the power and water resources to then attract, ultimately, tenants and customers, those customers being data centers and manufacturers.”
The project would create permanent jobs that would pay between $75,000 to $100,000 annually, Napier said.
Davin Lopez, president and CEO of the Mesilla Valley Development Alliance, urged the county commissioners to approve a deal with Napier’s company. He said it presents opportunities to generate tax dollars that can improve water infrastructure or address other major needs in the county.
“We need to move forward, because the last thing I want to do is chase away jobs and new revenue, tax revenue opportunities, for Doña Ana County, because we’re not going to be getting it from the federal government,” Lopez said.
In “Eddington,” which was shot partially in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the controversial and indomitable artificial intelligence data center survives the chaotic movie unscathed and supported by elected officials in the fictional small town. After the Tuesday meeting in Las Cruces, it also appeared that the Doña Ana County Commissioners are likely to approve the project deal at the hearing next month.
BorderPlex Digital’s project is an investment “that could help with our infrastructure, help with all the challenges that everyone has talked about today with water,” Lopez said. “But we don’t get there unless we have revenues and tax revenues to do that.”
About El Paso MattersEl Paso Matters is a member-supported nonpartisan media organization that uses journalism to expand civic capacity in our region. We inform and engage with people in El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and neighboring communities to create solutions-driven conversations about complex issues shaping our region.
Founded in 2019 by journalist Robert Moore, El Paso Matters focuses on in-depth and investigative reporting about El Paso and the Paso del Norte region.
El Paso Matters is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)3 status nonprofit. Donations made to El Paso Matters are tax deductible. (Click here for Ways To Give.)