- US$1bn Kansas City data centre goes live, LEED Gold with renewable matching and stormwater reuse.
- First AI-optimised Meta data centres due in 2026 after a 2022 design “rescoping.”
What happened: Campus goes live; AI-optimised build due in 2026
Meta said the Kansas City facility is operational and handling production traffic, part of a US$1bn investment announced when the site broke ground in 2022. The company reiterated its next-gen, GPU-ready design will come online in 2026 after a portfolio “rescoping” to accommodate liquid cooling and custom hardware. Key details are in DCD’s report, with Meta’s own update here: Meta newsroom post.
Local partners also flagged the project’s economic footprint—construction jobs peaking in the thousands and more than US$1m in community grants—see Missouri Partnership. Separately, utility forecasts show data-centre demand reshaping the regional grid: Evergy has extended load-growth guidance on the back of new facilities for big tech in Kansas and Missouri.
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Why it’s important
The go-live underscores Meta’s rapid scale-up ahead of AI-heavy workloads, but the harder tests lie in the next wave: delivering AI-optimised halls on time, securing power and water at scale, and proving that liquid-cooling retrofits can be operated reliably across a sprawling estate. DCD notes Meta paused and redesigned parts of its footprint in 2022, suggesting execution risk remains.
There is a broader story too. Large campuses boost local tax and jobs, yet they increase pressure on regional grids and transmission queues. Evergy’s guidance hints at that tension. As more companies plan multi-gigawatt server farms, regulators will have to balance local gains with land use, noise, and grid expansion needs, while operators come under closer review for how they source renewable power and what their actual on-site emissions look like.
