KUNA, Idaho — After four years of construction, Meta’s data center on the outskirts of Kuna is online and operational.
The facility encompasses more than 750,000 square feet, with two buildings currently serving online traffic. Meta says the campus is optimized for its latest artificial-intelligence hardware and helps process, store and transmit data for users around the world.
WATCH: Go inside Meta’s new Kuna data center, where robots move server racks and closed-loop cooling carries away heat
One 35,000-square-foot data hall sits inside a building stretching three football fields long and one football field wide. The room is maintained at about 85 degrees and contains 1,600 server racks.
“So this data hall is 40 rows of 40 servers. There’s 1,600 racks in this room,” Meta Critical Operations Manager Scott Stillings said while speaking over the sound of the servers.
Fiber-optic cables connect the servers across the campus and to the outside world. The racks can weigh hundreds to thousands of pounds, so robots transport them from the delivery area to their final positions inside the data halls.
Green contact points show technicians where the racks can be handled. Meta says they are designed to be maintained without tools as part of the Open Compute Project.
The two primary data-center buildings use a closed-loop cooling system. Water carries heat from the data halls to dry coolers, where fans pull air across coils before the same water returns to the servers.
“Meaning no water is being exchanged with the environment. No water is being consumed from these dry coolers,” Stillings said.
Meta says the system has no evaporative water loss and the water only needs to be replaced every seven to 10 years. A smaller portion of the campus uses evaporative cooling in additional rapid-deployment structures.
The company says it will begin publishing the facility’s actual water use and electricity consumption in its annual sustainability reports.
Meta also says the data center’s electricity use is matched with 100% clean and renewable energy. Three Meta-supported energy projects are expected to add 645 megawatts of renewable power in Ada County.
Construction peaked at more than 1,600 skilled-trade workers. The campus currently supports more than 75 operational jobs and is expected to represent more than $1.2 billion in investment once completed.
Meta says it invested more than $100 million in a dedicated water and wastewater system for Kuna. The company says that system was designed with additional capacity for future homes, businesses and development.
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The company also announced a $200,000 grant for the Kuna School District. The money will support a robotics and engineering lab at Swan Falls High School, preschool scholarships for approximately 20 low-income families, technology upgrades at six elementary schools, educator and tutor training and expanded virtual-learning opportunities.
Meta says it has provided more than $1.5 million directly to schools and nonprofit organizations in the Ada County area.
The campus also includes several local touches. Temporary irrigation is helping establish native vegetation outside the buildings. Meta says the irrigation can be removed once the plants take root.
Local artists painted murals inside the buildings, while conference rooms carry references to Napoleon Dynamite, which was filmed in Idaho. Room names include “Bow Hunting Skills,” “Getting Pretty Serious” and “Make Yourself a Dang Quesadilla.”
This story was initially reported by a journalist and has been, in part, converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
