Meta Los Lunas data center, Los Lunas, New Mexico

Meta's data center at Los Lunas, in Valencia County, New Mexico, stands along the Rio Grande near Interstate 25, south of Albuquerque; the company announced the project in 2016 and is now expanding it. On February 13, 2025 the village council unanimously approved an amended water agreement for the site and an industrial revenue bond ordinance for Greater Kudu LLC, a Meta subsidiary, to cover two more buildings for artificial intelligence work.

The water agreement holds Meta's allocation at 500 acre-feet a year, about 163 million gallons, cuts the peak daily draw allowed in extreme heat from 4.5 million gallons to 3 million, and limits that access to five days at most during an emergency. "This agreement ensures that they cannot exceed the existing amount that we've agreed upon," said public works director Michael Jaramillo.

The campus runs or is building 10 buildings across 750 acres and employs more than 180 people, a figure Meta expects to reach 400 at full build-out; Meta community development manager David Williams said the site is using about 60 percent of its water allocation and, "We will not be asking for any additional water."

Williams said, "On typical days, no water is used to cool our servers, even on hot summer days, water isn't needed when temperatures are below 85 degrees," and the company says it matches all of the site's electricity use with renewable energy.

Not everyone trusts the numbers: when the village weighed tax breaks for the expansion in 2021, the local group Valencia Water Watchers said the village had not been open about how much water the data center would use. Meta's withdrawals for the site came to 59 million gallons in 2020, rising to about 67 million gallons by 2024, drawn from the village system, Meta told the fact-checking site Snopes.

In 2026, as the Rio Grande dried early, social media posts claimed the data center had "completely drained" the river; Snopes rated that claim false in July, since the site buys municipal water from the village, whose system is supplied by groundwater wells, and Meta holds no Rio Grande water rights. A Bureau of Reclamation water operations supervisor told Snopes nothing indicated the data center was contributing to the drying, which the agency put down to low snowpack, reservoir storage, unusually warm temperatures and long-term drought.