Meta's $1.2B Kuna, Idaho Data Center Goes Live With Closed-Loop Cooling

Meta activated its data center campus in Kuna, Idaho on Thursday, 3 September 2026, a $1.2 billion facility built around a sealed, closed-loop water-cooling system that the company says will not need to be refilled for seven to ten years. It is Meta’s first data center in Idaho, built on 650 acres with roughly 750,000 square feet of building space, and is now drawing power matched against 645 MW of new solar capacity Meta has backed in the state.

What is known

Meta officials, quoted by local outlets at the activation ceremony, described the cooling system as only the second of its kind at a Meta facility: a recirculating loop holding about 200,000 gallons of water that is charged once rather than continuously topped up. “You fill up the system one time, and it’s good for seven to 10 years,” Meta’s Brad Davis told East Idaho News. A second Meta representative, Scott Stillings, added that “the water that is used today to cool this facility is the same water that will be used tomorrow, and for the next 10 years,” according to Idaho Press’s coverage of the same event.

On power, Meta says it is backing three solar projects totaling 645 MW to match the site’s consumption — a figure Idaho Press and East Idaho News both reported as roughly 17% of Idaho Power’s all-time system peak demand, illustrating the scale of load a single AI-optimized campus now represents relative to a mid-sized US utility. The project has grown substantially since Meta’s original 2022 announcement, when the company described an $800 million, 960,000-square-foot campus; the higher final price tag reflects a design pause and re-scoping toward AI workloads and liquid cooling that Meta applied to a number of paused sites over the past two years. Construction employed a peak of 1,600 tradespeople; permanent staffing is around 75 people currently, rising toward roughly 100.

What it means for a power buyer

Kuna is not a colocation deal — Meta owns and operates it outright — but the numbers are a useful yardstick for anyone tracking where hyperscale power and water budgets are heading. A single campus backed by 645 MW of dedicated solar is larger than the entire contracted capacity of most national colocation markets we track in the Colocation Price Index: for comparison, Malaysia’s headline-grabbing Johor buildout is measured in individual 40–200 MW campus phases, not gigawatt-scale single sites. That gap is one reason hyperscalers increasingly self-build in markets with available land and power headroom rather than lease, while turning to third-party colocation in power- or land-constrained hubs such as Singapore or Johor.

The closed-loop water design is also worth watching outside the US. Water availability is already a live planning constraint in our core Southeast Asian markets — it was cited directly in Malaysia’s 2026 restrictions on non-AI data center approvals and in resident objections to projects in Gelang Patah, Johor. A sealed-loop system that avoids continuous water draw is the kind of design increasingly asked for by regulators and communities in water-stressed markets, and it appears in our data center water usage guide as one of the mitigation approaches operators are adopting. Buyers evaluating sites in the region should expect operators to increasingly quote water-loop design, not just PUE, as a differentiator.

What we don’t know

Meta did not disclose the facility’s IT load in megawatts, the generation of GPU or accelerator hardware being deployed, or a breakdown of how much of the cost increase from $800 million to $1.2 billion is attributable to the liquid-cooling redesign versus general construction inflation. It is also unclear whether the 645 MW of solar is sized to the campus’s current load or to a larger planned build-out, since Meta has not published a target IT capacity for the site. Local reporting is inconsistent on whether Kuna is Meta’s 28th or 29th US data center, suggesting the two figures come from different counting methods (by state versus by individual campus) that Meta has not clarified.