Tomorrow, Doña Ana County Commissioners took the first step for supporting the construction of one of the largest data centers in the United States. Data centers are a key component to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and the internet services almost everyone uses today. Controversy around them has also risen as more data centers are deployed across the globe. The $165 billion project to be built in Santa Teresa can become the largest data center in the United States if it is developed as planned.
The United States is home to some of the most advanced data centers in the world. Meta Platforms, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, owns the largest center in the US. The Oregon datacenter takes up 4.6 million square feet.
Meta is building a $7.1 million data center in El Paso on 1,039 acres of land it purchased from the city in the northeast for $8.5 million in late 2023. By comparison, Borderplex Digital plans to spend $165 billion constructing its data center over the next ten years.
Although the essential engine behind today’s popular technologies, the companies building data centers are notoriously secretive about them. The companies behind the extremely large data centers, or hyperscale data centers like the one destined for Santa Teresa, “are well-known for their over-the-top secrecy.” Government officials are routinely asked to sign non-disclosure agreements and code words, like Project Jupiter, are assigned to the projects to help keep them secret.
Project Jupiter
Project Jupiter, a hyperscale AI data center campus, is the code name of the project that will be discussed tomorrow by the Doña Ana County commissioners. They will be discussing approving incentives for the data center, including $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds.
Borderplex Digital Assets is the company spearheading the data center. It wants to build a one-stop shop for future server needs in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and online services sector. Instead of individual companies building data centers, Borderplex Digital intends to offer a one-stop solution for data services. Currently, companies like Amazon or Meta must engineer their data centers, acquire land and develop the necessary infrastructure like electricity, internet connectivity and water to operate their centers. They also need to contract systems engineers and buy networking equipment to connect the servers to the internet. Borderplex Digital proposes having everything in place for the tenants to connect their services to their customers across the globe.
BorderPlex Digital Assets
Borderplex Digital Assets was formed in Delaware on June 4, 2024 under the name of El Paso Digital Assets, LLC and subsequently changed its name to Borderplex Digital. On January 31, 2025, the company filed paperwork with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to raise private funds as equity shares from investors. Under the Rule 506(b) that the company used to raise funds, the company “can raise an unlimited amount of money and can sell securities to an unlimited number of accredited investors.” However, the company can sell to no more than 35 investors, and it cannot advertise the investments to the public. According to its SEC filing, Borderpleax Digital’s minimum investment requirement was $20,000. Borderplex Digital reported $20.6 million in investments in its January filing. Of the money raised, $1.05 million was to be used to pay certain executives for “out-of-pocket preformation expenditures.”
With its proposed development, BorderPlex is positioning itself as the warehouse for the AI technologies of the future,
On Monday STACK Infrastructure announced that it had joined BorderPlex Digital Assets to help build the Santa Teresa data center. STACK Infrastructure operates 53 data centers in 12 countries and is planning 77 additional centers.
BorderPlex Digital lists ten individuals on its leadership webpage. Among them includes Alicia J. Keyes, the former New Mexico Cabinet Secretary of Economic Development, former Texas Land Commissioner, George Prescott Bush and Miguel Fernandez. Bush is the son of Jeb Bush, the brother of former President George W. Bush and grandson of former President George H. Bush.
Keyes was appointed by Michelle Lujan in January 2019 as the secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department. She resigned in June 2023.
Fernandez is well-known in El Paso for his political campaign contributions.
Miguel Fernandez
Miguel Fernandez, a frequent contributor to political campaigns in El Paso, is owner of Flo Networks, a digital services company formerly known as Transtelco, which was founded in 2001. His father, Miguel Fernández Iturriza, was a well-known Juárez owner of the Coca Cola bottling company and the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) candidate for Chihuahua’s mayor in 1986. Rodrigo Fernandez, Miguel Farnandez’s brother is the also a cofounder of Transtelco, now Flo Networks.
Miguel and his father were members of the controversial Paso del Norte Group which later became REDCo. During the mayoral campaign for mayor in last year’s election, Renard Johnson was funded by a controversial Republican-backed Political Action Committee (PAC) – Protect and Serve. The PAC spent $150,231 towards Johnson’s election. Miguel Fernandez contributed $25,000 to PAC in addition to the $32,500 he made in political contributions directly to the Johnson Campaign.
Shortly after being appointed to the board of managers of the University Medical Center of El Paso (UMC), Fernandez was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated.
In 2011, Transtelco was found to have been using city property to run fiber optic cables from the US to México under the Stanton International Bridge without the authorization of the City of El Paso since 2006. Transtelco paid $193,980.42 to settle the unauthorized use of city property and past fees owed to the city.
Miguel Fernandez is listed as the “Fiber Partner” for BorderPlex Digital Assets.
To make the project work, BorderPlex Digital Services is asking the Doña Ana County commissioners to approve a series of tax incentives for the project on Friday.
The Incentives
To build the four data centers and private electric plant, the company behind the data center has asked the county commissioners for incentives, including $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds (IRB). IRBs are used by New Mexico government entities as economic development tools. Among the incentives that IRBs offer include tax subsidies and helping to finance projects. Essentially, the government entity “owns” the project for the duration of the IRB, making the project tax free because it is owned by a governmental body. As part of the IRB transaction, the government leases the project back to the company during the period of the IRB, usually 30 years. At the end of the IRB, the company purchases the project from the government for a set fee. Over 100 IRBs have been issued by New Mexico government officials since 1985. In announcing the project and the incentives in February, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan said that “this groundbreaking partnership further cements our reputation as a national leader in advanced manufacturing and global trade.”
If the IRBs are approved tomorrow, the around 229,000 residents of Doña Ana County will essentially be used as a conduit to keep the project tax free for the owners. According to the bond counsel behind the proposed IRBs, Christopher Muirhead, “the county is technically the owner of the property” but if the project fails or the IRBs end in 30 years, the property reverts to the company or its creditors. Muirhead added that the county “will not be the operator” of Project Jupiter.
Tomorrow’s vote includes three bonds. The Series A bond for up to $15 billion will be used for a private electric power plant and battery storage facilities. The Series B bond of $25 billion will be used to build four data centers. The last bond, Series C for $125 billion, will be used for the computer equipment used by the data center.
The largest industrial revenue bond issued in New Mexico prior to tomorrow’s vote is for $942 million issued by Bernalillo County in September 2024 to Ebon Solar. The city council of Alburquerque voted on Monday to issue $776.6 million in IRBs to help fund a $1 billion advanced fusion technology center in Mesa del Sol. Across the country most revenue bonds are capped at $10 million although New Mexico does not have the cap.
If Doña Ana commissioners approve the three IRBs tomorrow, they will be the largest, by far, issuance of the bonds in the country.
The proposed IRBs do not require Doña Ana County residents to fund the project or borrow money for it. They only allow the company building it to benefit from the county’s tax exemption status. The other incentives that the commissioners will be voting on Friday include another $50 million in incentives to help the project develop water infrastructure. Water usage is one of several controversies for the project.
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The Controversies
Large data centers come at the cost of the consumption of electricity and water. The so-called hyperscale data centers are the ones owned and operated by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta. Together with Alibaba, they own around 35% of the worldwide data centers. Four percent of the global electric consumption is used by data centers across the globe. Electric consumption by data centers is expected to continue to increase as more are built.
When Phase 1 of the El Paso Meta data center opens in El Paso, it is expected to use around 200 megawatts of electricity. El Paso Electric’s largest power generator is the natural-gas Newman Unit 6 which generates around 226 megawatts of electricity. This power generation can power around 120,000 homes according to the electric company. But by the time the third phase of the Meta data center comes online, its electric power consumption is expected to jump to 600 megawatts.
Santa Teresa’s Project Jupiter is expected to require one gigawatt of electricity to operate, almost twice as much as El Paso’s Meta data center. Project Jupiter is building a natural gas generator at the site for electricity but promises to be carbon-neutral by 2045.
The first county commissioners’ meeting drew both supporters and opponents to the Borderplex Digital proposal. Except for commissioner Susana Chaparro who voiced concerns over unanswered questions that her constituents had, the Doña Ana County Commissioners voted four-to-one to approve moving forward with the project. Tomorrow’s vote is the final step in approving the project.
The biggest concern expressed by the opponents is the use of dwindling water supplies in the area for cooling the servers. Proponents of the project argued that water was not an issue as the project was expected to use a closed-loop system where the water initially added to the tanks at the plant would be recycled, reducing the need to use additional water. Proponents also argue that the project would offer construction jobs during the construction of the vast campus and around 750 full-time jobs at the location to keep the systems running.
Large data centers consume electricity in large doses. Electricity generates heat which must be cooled to keep the equipment functioning properly. Water is used to help cool equipment. Crypto mining and AI consume the largest amounts of electricity and generate lots of heat.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, by 2030, “data centers are projected to account for at most 25% of the new electricity demand.” The largest driving force behind building new data centers is the growing AI industry. Two of the top three data centers are in China and the third largest one is in the US.
On September 9, the Sunland Park City Council unanimously approved a resolution asking the Doña Ana County commissioners to delay the approval of the incentives to allow more time to study the project to see how it may impact electric rates, housing prices and water supplies.
Although the data center developers are promising to build a sustainable project, questions about water usage have many people concerned. Water and electricity are the primary concerns, in addition to noise problems other data centers have caused in other locations. Over 4% of the electricity usage in the country is consumed by the data centers. Large amounts of water are also needed to help keep the equipment cool.
Across the country activists are mobilizing in opposition to the data centers that power their Amazon shopping and Google searches arguing that the costs outweigh the benefits.
Part of the problem is the lack of transparency from the data center developers. From using project code names to refusing to disclose information, leaves unanswered questions about their operations. Although Project Jupiter promises to meet New Mexico’s 2045 net-zero carbon emissions it will need to build a private electric utility using natural gas when it launches to meet its electricity requirements. It has also promised to build a closed-system water system to help it recycle the water it uses to cool its equipment. The water system will require an initial 10 million gallons of water to fill it and will use 20,000 daily gallons of water for its building. On average, El Paso residents consume around 130 gallons of water each day, including water used for landscaping.
Because of the opaqueness of data center operations in general, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy and commitment to their promises.
Lack of Data Center Transparency
Transparency with the data center developers is so opaque that it is impossible to map the data centers in the country. To overcome the opaqueness, New York-based business and financial news publication, Business Insider undertook a months’ long project to identify, catalogue and report on the exploding data center projects across the globe. Its data center reports, and map is the most comprehensive data set about data centers to date.
Because there are no regulatory agencies that oversee data centers directly and because the developers refused to answer questions about their developments, Business Insider was forced to “pull obscure state records and scoured corporate disclosures.”
To find the illusive data centers, Business Insider pulled air permits for backup electric generators that data centers must have to ensure they remain online during blackouts. Because the industrial generators require air quality approval permits, Business Insider correlated the permits with other information to identify where the data centers are located.
Business Insider identified 1,240 existing or planned data centers in the country. Because data centers refuse to divulge their water usage, the publication took their data center list and requested the metered water usage from the water utilities. What they found is that “some of the largest data center facilities were permitted to use more water a day than you might expect nearly 49,000 Americans to use.”
The publication also estimated that the current and future data centers will use “nearly as much as they entire state of Florida used” in 2023. Business Insider also estimated that the “annual public health costs from electricity generation for data centers could reach between $5.7 billion and $9.2 billion.” The health costs come from the air pollutants from generating electricity from the power plants and the emergency generators, according to the publication.
Just in 2025, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are planning to spend around $320 billion this year on data centers because of AI technology. Much of the data center development is being subsidized by taxpayers through tax incentives in the hopes that the center will bring high-paying jobs.
Business Insider also found that around 40% of data centers are in areas that have “high or extremely high water scarcity.” Water is used to keep the equipment from overheating. The two companies with the highest number of data centers in water stressed areas are Amazon and Microsoft. The companies build their data centers in places where there are vast amounts of land and a stable supply of electricity without taking water stress into account. “A typical data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water daily.,” according to a 2023 QTS report that Business Insider quoted. But the developers of data centers are ignoring water problems when selecting where to build their next project.
In its 2024 Environmental Report, Google says that its “data centers consumed 6.1 billion gallons of water – 17% more than the previous year.” The Google report added that its electric use saw similar growth in consumption.
Since the 1980’s Arizona has required cities to prove they have enough water resources for the next 100 years before a new development can be approved. Nonetheless, Arizona is home to the county’s largest data center markets.
AI Driving Data Center Construction
It is the AI technology that is driving the boom in data center construction, Business Insider found. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have announced massive increases in their spending on data centers this year. A recent Bank of America Global Research report found that spending on data center construction hit $40 billion in June.
In recent days, rumors that Oracle will likely be one of the first tenants for the Santa Teresa data center. Helping to drive the rumors is tomorrow’s upcoming vote on the incentives for the Santa Teresa data center and the recent forecast by Oracle about its plans to spend around $35 billion in 2026.
Oracle’s planned expenditure is driven by its growing work in AI. Oracle and OpenAI recently teamed up to collaborate on a new Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas.
The Doña Ana county commissioners are expected to vote on the proposed project tomorrow.