Tennessee's Meta data farm to expand capacity for memes, photos, status updates

Good news for Facebook socialites sharing cat memes, inspired status updates and photo galleries of fun nights out.

The already-massive Tennessee hub for Meta's data storage and processing is expanding.

Twenty miles north of Nashville, in the relatively quaint town of Gallatin, a collection of colossal server farms that store Meta's content in Tennessee and beyond will add a fifth warehouse location. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently filed a site-plan request to begin construction on a 276,000 square-foot data center.

Like the four other data centers at the Gallatin Industrial Park, this new building will be filled with tens of thousands of humming, rectangular servers connected by fiber optic cables.

"They have this down to an art — building these data centers," Gallatin Economic Development Agency Interim Director Rosemary Bates said. "They have their own concrete batch plant and an electric substation with a direct feed from Tennessee Valley Authority."

Meta's growth will be a windfall for the city's tax rolls and for local charitable contributions, Bates said.

"We’re happy they can go ahead and add this fifth building," Bates added. "They contribute a great deal to local nonprofits and our school system."

Meta's impact on Summer County: taxes to donations

Since construction on the 800-acre data farm began in 2020, Meta said it has donated nearly $1 million to Sumner County schools.

The company has invested more than $1 billion to develop the server farm and plans to continue growing to fill out its 800-acre property. The buildings use 100% renewable energy and strategies to minimize the high amount of water needed to keep the machines cool.

The data-center complex is poised to become the city's largest contributor to property taxes. It negotiated property tax discounts for the next 20 years, but it will still deliver tens of millions of dollars a year to county coffers until then, according to an economic-impact analysis.

Data centers are in high demand because of increasing digital dependency.

Tennessee Valley Authority officials anticipate a 50% increase in the server farms in Tennessee over the coming decade.

"We are looking for companies that were going to contribute more to the tax revenue side than adding lots of jobs," Bates said. "We wanted low job numbers because unemployment is 3% or under. We weren’t necessarily looking for companies that were going to need 300 workers."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee's Meta data farm to expand. What it means for Facebook