Meta Says Two Years Matched Its First Fifteen Of Data Centers
Meta published a conversation with Rachel Peterson, its VP of Data Centers, on August 6, 2026, explaining why the company designs and operates its own AI data centers instead of renting from cloud providers.
Transcript
Meta's data center chief says the last one to two years matched Meta's first fifteen years of data center construction.
Peterson joined Meta in 2009, when it rented data center space. Meta chose to design its own hardware, network and software, and she says it became an infrastructure company.
Meta says in Louisiana it pays for the infrastructure it adds, and its investment will save the utility Entergy's customers more than two billion dollars in otherwise higher energy bills.
Meta says cooling water circulates in a closed loop, never discharged, and that a Beaver Dam site opening soon will use less water each year than two full-service restaurants.
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Sources
Every claim in this video comes from the top ranking coverage of this topic. The claims and where each one came from:
- What we had constructed over the first 15 years of our data center program, we've probably constructed over the last one to two years alone.(Meta's official announcement)
- My name is Rachel Peterson, and I lead the data center team here at Meta. And so what that means is that my team's responsible for basically the life cycle of a data center.(Meta's official announcement)
- I joined back in 2009. And at that time, Meta, Facebook at that point, was just kicking off their sort of data center program... And we were in a bunch of rented facilities of data center providers.(Meta's official announcement)
- That meant not just building the data center, but really controlling the full stack that goes to everything from the hardware that's going into the data center, to the software that we're designing, to building a really custom built infrastructure.(Meta's official announcement)
- we've really shifted looking at maybe ourselves as just a software company in some ways to a full on infrastructure company, which is a very big shift.(Meta's official announcement)
- For example, in our Louisiana data center, we work closely with Entergy, the utility, ensuring that we're paying for the infrastructure that we're putting in place.(Meta's official announcement)
- But we actually are going to be saving their customers more than two billion dollars of what they would have paid otherwise had Meta not gone to that location... Yeah, increases in their energy bills.(Meta's official announcement)
- we design our data centers to be a completely closed loop system... it circulates within the facility and it doesn't go anywhere. It's basically used within the facility and it's not discharged anywhere.(Meta's official announcement)
- One of our recent facilities that will be operational soon is in Beaver Dam. And that facility, for example, the amount of water we will be using there per year is going to be less than two full-service restaurants.(Meta's official announcement)