New Mexico and El Paso Spent Millions on Climate Plans. Three New Data Centers Could Undo Them.

Meta is building a massive data center on the northeast edge of El Paso, Texas, on the New Mexico border. Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Last December, New Mexico officials celebrated publication of a plan to address climate change, designed to dramatically reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A few months later, just across the state line in Texas, El Paso city officials adopted their own such plan with a similar ambition. Each report cost millions of dollars to draft, but neither one took into account how the construction of data centers could upend climate goals in both places. Work is underway in Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico on one of the largest data center developments in the country: Project Jupiter, built by Austin-based Oracle.