Seeking to make the El Paso area a data center hub was a major element of the Borderplex Alliance’s economic development plan released in summer 2025.

Detailed plans to recruit data centers and their suppliers are one chapter in the 176-page “2030 Bridge Plan.”

But a year later, the El Paso area’s private industrial recruitment agency, which helped bring the huge Meta Platforms data center campus to El Paso, not surprisingly, has halted recruitment of additional data centers in light of local and national backlash against the facilities and El Paso’s end of tax breaks for future data centers.

“We are not actively recruiting data centers,” Jon Barela, the Borderplex’s chief executive officer, said in a recent interview. “It’s no secret that there is pushback to data centers.”

However, it continues to recruit artificial intelligence and data center suppliers, he said.

“The AI supply chain that is establishing itself in the region is quite phenomenal,” he said. “Whether you like data centers or AI or not, our region now has over 32,000 manufacturing jobs in the AI supply chain,” with about half of those across the border in Juárez, Mexico, he said.

The $14 billion Meta campus, under construction in Northeast El Paso, is the largest industrial project that the Borderplex Alliance has helped recruit to this area in its 13 years of existence.

A dirt shovel bearing the blue Meta logo on its white blade sits in a corner of Barela’s small, third-floor office in the 114-year-old Centre Building in Downtown El Paso. It’s a keepsake from Meta’s ceremonial groundbreaking ceremony in October 2025 for its El Paso project. Meta operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

“We’ve put a pause on recruitment because of the data center policies” enacted by El Paso and Socorro in recent months, he said. Those policies put strict requirements on future data center projects in the neighboring cities.

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The El Paso guidelines include a ban on future tax breaks for large data centers, like the multimillion-dollar tax breaks the city and county approved in December 2023 for the Meta complex.

El Paso County also is working on guidelines for future data center projects.

“We support the policies,” Barela said. “In our business, you have to be very nimble and agile to accommodate changing political and economic realities.”

“As the data center developments around the country have evolved, it’s clear that incentives will not be part of any kind of, likely not to be part of, or focal point of any municipality or state’s incentive package” in the future, Barela said.

Several El Paso City Council members tried to revoke Meta’s incentives agreement. But city officials convinced a majority of council members that it would be too costly to do so, and could damage El Paso’s reputation as a good place to do business.

Meta’s complex will benefit this area in added tax revenues, with thousands of construction jobs, and in other ways, Barela said.

Its huge capital investment in El Paso also put this area on other companies’ radar, he said.

“I fundamentally believe that many of the (potential) projects we are now looking at, which are not data center related, would not have occurred before the investment and the confidence Meta had in our region,” he said.

Meta recently made a deal with the huge BlackRock investment firm to fund most of the $14 billion development costs of the El Paso complex, with Meta becoming a minority owner and tenant of the campus. Barela had no comments on the deal.

Meta isn’t the only huge data center complex rising in this area. Oracle is also building the Project Jupiter data center campus in the Santa Teresa area, essentially an El Paso suburb, as opponents continue to fight it.

The Army also has plans to put a huge data center complex on Fort Bliss land in far East El Paso County.

Borderplex has no involvement in either of those projects, Barela said.

Even with the public and political backlash, Barela said he wouldn’t rule out future data center projects.

“I still think there will be some element of activity in the future in respect to a data center project,” Barela said.

“There’s still room, in my opinion, to have one or two more data centers in this community,” possibly large ones, he said. But Borderplex is “not actively working on any data center projects now.”

Vic Kolenc may be reached at 915-546-6421; vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; @vickolenc on X, and @vkolenc.bsky.social on Bluesky.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Borderplex Alliance stops data center recruitment amid public backlash

Reporting by Vic Kolenc, El Paso Times / El Paso Times

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

By Vic Kolenc, El Paso Times | USA TODAY Network