Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

When he was a “punk-ass skater kid,” Diego Mendoza-Moyers would circle the drainage ditches of El Paso, “a Wild West town upon which a modern city has been built,” as he’d later describe it. He loved the yellow poppies blooming on the side of the mountains, and a song by an El Pasoan who goes by Mr. Crazy Chuco Town: “I love my city, it’s that EPT.” Today, at age thirty, he works as an energy and environment reporter for El Paso Matters. He characterizes the journalism landscape in his area as not “the most robust” compared with, say, a coastal city where reporters compete to be the first to break a piece of news. Here, “if I’m not telling a story,” he told me, “no one else is sometimes.” 

That is pretty much what happened in 2023. No one, including Mendoza-Moyers, caught wind of a story that would later become major news: a deal that the City of El Paso made with Meta, which was operating under a holding company called Wurldwide LLC. The plan was to build a data center, a facility designed to train and deploy artificial intelligence models, requiring tremendous power and liquid cooling. Meta’s commitment at the time was to spend eight hundred million dollars on construction. They’re going to pay taxes, Mendoza-Moyers remembered the general understanding being. But, in fact, the company received thirty-five years’ worth of tax abatements. “Our economic development department and our elected officials in El Paso showered Meta with all these tax breaks that, I think, if they came now, wouldn’t be negotiated,” he said. 

Meta emerged with a partnership around the same time with El Paso Water, a big local utility, and promised the region fifty low-wage jobs (though that number later rose to three hundred). A local advocacy group claimed that nondisclosure agreements had been signed, otherwise veiling the plans in secrecy. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment.) That is not uncommon, in such cases: according to Erik Bonds and Viktor Newby, a professor and a student of sociology, respectively, at the University of Mary Washington, in a study of data centers being built in Virginia, at least twenty-five of the total thirty-one in their sample had used NDAs with local governments. “Democracy—some say—dies in the dark,” Bonds and Newby wrote. “But that is exactly where many data center deals are born and live.” 

The arrival of a data center in El Paso was, many agreed, a complicated situation. It might be hard for some in this region to turn down any glimmer of investment. “In El Paso, we’re always so desperate for any industry not to pass us over,” Mendoza-Moyers said. Sara Sanchez, a staff writer for El Paso Inc., a business-community-focused paper, told me that the city has long been in transition, “trying to figure out what our next big economic driver is going to be.” In 1997, the El Paso Times characterized the city as the “Number One Job Loser” in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which an academic argued had caused “severe pauperization” of large swaths of the city, particularly those involved in what had been a gigantic garment industry. 

Local journalism, in the intervening years, alternately withered and bloomed. The once-giant El Paso Herald Post closed in 1997. Operating today are the newish: El Paso Matters, a nonprofit founded in 2019; the El Paso Times, owned by Gannett, and subject in recent years to major layoffs, as well as shifting its printing across the border, to Ciudad Juárez; El Paso Inc., the small, business-focused paper; KTEP, a university-owned radio station; KVIA, an ABC and CW affiliate; El Diario de El Paso, a daily Spanish-language newspaper based in Mexico; and KTDO, a Telemundo station, among others. Some of them didn’t respond to my requests to talk about data center coverage; Tim Archuleta, the executive editor of the El Paso Times, pointed me to the work of Vic Kolenc, a business reporter assigned to cover the Meta data center. “We are tracking many developments related to the center and providing updates when significant developments surface,” Archuleta said via email. Jesus Rodriguez, from KVIA, noted that, “as with many large corporate developments, detailed information is often limited in the early stages since it’s managed by private companies,” and described a reliance on public records. Springing up amid this patchwork is also Real FitFam El Paso, an Instagram page with nearly seven hundred thousand followers that various El Pasoans have described as a major news source. (When it was temporarily shut down by Meta, a commenter asked, “Don’t they understand this [is] our local news channel??”) Despite the relatively numerous outlets, the deal with Meta, via Wurldwide LLC, came as a surprise to most El Pasoans—a testament to the challenge of covering a story shrouded in NDAs and economic need. 

Heath Haussamen, an independent journalist in nearby Doña Ana County—over the New Mexico state line, and home to another data center project, Project Jupiter—characterized his neighboring area as even more of a news desert. There’s him, writing at Haussamen.com. There are papers headquartered many hours away, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The Las Cruces Sun-News, owned by Gannett, told me that its first piece of reporting on Project Jupiter was an article by Jessica Onsurez—“What’s a Data Center?”—spotlighting those with environmental objections to a deal that was being brokered between the State of New Mexico and BorderPlex Digital Assets. (“Who’s ever heard of them?” Mendoza-Moyers asked, rhetorically, of the company.) As it turned out, the five-billion-dollar plan for a “digital infrastructure campus,” which became a 165-billion-dollar sketch for Project Jupiter, wasn’t even really owned by BorderPlex. Behind the scenes were OpenAI and Oracle—mentioned not once in the initial Project Jupiter announcement, nor, as a result, in Onsurez’s article about it. The construction would take place near Santa Teresa, on the New Mexico side of the El Paso metro area: a “frontline, fence-line community,” as Kacey Hovden, a Las Cruces–based lawyer at the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, put it to me. “I don’t even think this is an assertion,” Haussamen said. “I think it’s a fact that at least some of these big companies look for communities that are news deserts to build projects like these, because it’s easier for them when there’s less public scrutiny, and I don’t think that they expected the news coverage they got here.”

It’s now been nearly three years since the Meta deal went through. Much in El Paso and its environs has changed. Saul Gonzalez, an organizer with Sembrando Esperanza, a local activist group, told me that utility prices have gone up for residents. AI is a more visible industry, and more data centers are appearing in more places. Mendoza-Moyers is beginning to dig into new questions. “I’ve been trying to be really honest with readers and listeners,” he said. “I’m not, like, up at night like, Oh man, I really screwed that up,” he said. “But it’s like, I probably could have focused a little bit more. Let’s pay attention to stuff like that a little bit closer and really, you know, scour the agendas of our water utility and city council for these kinds of economic development agreements with some more detail.” In late March, Meta announced that it would invest five hundred thousand dollars into a workforce development grant in partnership with local El Paso schools; more recently, and likely in response to community pressure, the El Paso city government heard a legal presentation on the potential costs of breaking the contract with Wurldwide/Meta—a number that might exceed a billion dollars. In 2023, Mendoza-Moyers told me, no one really knew what AI’s infrastructural needs were. In 2026, everyone is more aware—which is not to say the battered infrastructure of local journalism is up to the task.

From Albuquerque, four hours northwest of the El Paso area, Joshua Bowling of SourceNM, an affiliate of States Newsroom, the country’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, spoke to me about the difficulties of reporting on data centers. He’d been following the development of Project Jupiter, among others. “These are massive corporate interests that have billions of dollars on the line to get this infrastructure up and running as quickly as possible, and communities, I feel like, at least in the case of Doña Ana County, they don’t really have a lot of time to understand why OpenAI wants to set up in their community so quickly and at such a large scale,” he said. 

Recently, Bowling broke a story about a “secretive ad campaign” in support of Project Jupiter landing in mailboxes across New Mexico and also on the front pages of the Albuquerque Journal, the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Las Cruces Sun-News. The group behind the campaign, Elevate New Mexico, featured a smiling stock model who has also appeared, Bowling noted, on an unrelated dentistry website, as well as a brochure for the League of Arizona Cities and Towns. “What I have kept a particular eye on,” Bowling told me, “is the transparency and accountability.” Bowling was not able to determine who, exactly, was behind the Elevate New Mexico ads, though he found that some had been paid for by a public affairs and communications firm named APCO Worldwide LLC, which has a “data center advisory services” division. (APCO did not comment for Bowling’s piece, nor did it respond when I reached out.) 

“It behooves us all to know when there’s an outside actor seeking to sway public opinion,” Bowling told me. “And we have not had a lot of clear answers in the last six or so months as to who is behind these deals. Who’s driving them? The BorderPlex Digital Assets website, at one point, took down its leadership page, so you couldn’t even see who the company’s executives are, and you have to go on the Internet Archive and find an old version of the website to see who’s on it.” BorderPlex did not respond to my request for comment; nor did OpenAI or STACK Infrastructure, another company involved with Project Jupiter. Oracle provided a statement: “Our data center in New Mexico is expected to generate 4,000 construction jobs, as well as more than 1,500 permanent jobs—including technicians, engineers, security, and logistics professionals—onsite or in the community once construction is completed. Local suppliers, vendors, contractors and residents will be prioritized.”

About a decade ago, Bowling was a suburban city hall reporter at the Arizona Republic, in Phoenix. He covered the interest, among the administrators of various bedroom communities, in attracting data centers: “The argument was, ‘Well, Microsoft is going to get us on the map, and that’s going to let us attract other big employers.’” He had some déjà vu looking into Project Jupiter. “You start to see some of the same community investment promises that are made,” he said. “You know, donations to the schools, things of that nature.” Soon, Bowling would be appearing with journalists from India and Bangladesh, at a Society for Environmental Journalists conference panel on the challenges of data center reporting. “It’s very jargon-heavy,” Bowling said, of utility and environmental-impact lingo. “When you start talking about gigawatts and megawatts and dekatherms, and all of these different units of measure for power, that is, in and of itself, very confusing, and I don’t think necessarily always the most helpful to readers.” 

In a sense, data center stories can be difficult to tell because they attempt to convey something about the future when the past remains obscured and the present is sliding by fast. Project Jupiter and the Meta data center are both still relatively speculative: neither is yet up and running, and the City of El Paso recently released a climate action plan that Mendoza-Moyers reported on, noting changes to the plans for the data center and its emissions. The city is now holding “listening sessions” with irate residents. Still, in late March, Meta announced that its El Paso data center was expanding to be a ten-billion-dollar facility. It was an investment increase of “over sixfold,” CNBC reported. “They are going to strip our city of natural resources, pollute our air, and increase our utility bills,” wrote a Google Reviews user under the name Jonathan Z, giving one star to the Meta center. I noted the future tense, and wondered to myself: Is it possible to report on the future when you have only certain scraps of historical information? 

Mendoza-Moyers seemed to take that question to heart early this month on the podcast he hosts for El Paso Matters, discussing, with a colleague, the ins and outs of what this data center meant for El Paso, along several lines: the electrical grid, the potential tax revenue, the recent increase in energy rates (which Mendoza-Moyers clarified was not from the data center, but from other moves by El Paso Electric four or five years ago), water usage, and air pollution—something that had been, in Mendoza-Moyers’s view, relatively “glossed over.” Meta was promising that El Paso would essentially save money on electricity. The company would be building its own electrical-generation facility, called the McCloud Generation Plant, with the help of El Paso Electric—and paying the cost for a “bridge period” of one to five years, after which the McCloud facility’s costs would spread out to the general El Paso public, pending approval by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. “We need to interrogate that more, explore the numbers,” Mendoza-Moyers said.

Haussamen, for his part, has been filing public records requests to the state and county, which confirmed the existence of NDAs. Quickly, his coverage of Project Jupiter also became kind of meta, so to speak: not just the narrative of the data center’s construction, but the narrative of his own reporting about it. “The state’s Economic Development Department, to put it mildly, has been resistant to my efforts,” he wrote on his website. He posted a timeline of Project Jupiter–related events, as well as various documents he’d obtained. His coverage disclosed, too, that he is married to Sarah Silva—a state representative who supports Project Jupiter, and who wrote an op-ed about it in El Paso Matters with her colleagues Nathan Small and Joanne Ferrary. The group highlighted a man named Hugo, “a skilled construction worker in Chaparral, who wants to stay close to his aging parents and keep hosting big family cookouts. But he doesn’t want to break his back for a job that doesn’t even pay his bills. Hugo knows his labor is worth more than the low wages he’s currently offered. We all know young people like Hugo—folks who want to build their lives here but worry about their financial prospects.” Project Jupiter, the lawmakers argued, would allow Hugo to stay and find work at the data center. 

Haussamen, in turn, published a piece on his site noting that Project Jupiter’s “big promises are legally binding,” spelling out for readers exactly how many jobs, at what salaries, were being dangled. As with the Meta center, the jobs numbers at Project Jupiter have, notably, changed, though in the other direction: Haussamen reported that “the companies intend to hire 750 full-time and 50 part-time employees within three years of commencing operations of the data centers. During construction, the companies project hiring 2,500 employees.” But a later report from Bowling, drawing on a court filing, noted that those numbers had gone down to “at least 800” jobs. When we spoke, Haussamen expressed support for the economic fuel that a data center could provide, but told me that he had concerns: “Project Jupiter talked a good game about local jobs, but one of the first things they did was hire a company from Kansas to come level the dirt for this site, and so they imported a bunch of workers.” He took a picture of a Project Jupiter construction truck passing through Doña Ana County recently, flashing Kansas plates. “Was there really not an El Paso construction company that could have done that?” Haussamen mused. “I don’t know the answer to that.” In any case, Hugo from Chaparral didn’t seem to be driving.

Even so, Haussamen said, his Project Jupiter coverage has represented “the first time I ever thought that a Web-based news organization might actually be able to fill the readership, like the local readership, that newspapers no longer do.” That was an upside. “It’s just been a void all across America, and I have started more than one news organization,” he told me. “I’ve started a nonprofit, a for-profit, and I’ve always found it very difficult to replace a newspaper. My articles about Project Jupiter were shared so widely in this community that people at the grocery store or just random places would see my name and say, ‘Wait, are you the guy who wrote that story?’ And would tell me, ‘You’re the only one. I was trying to figure out about this.’ And they saw your article on Facebook, or it was shared by a friend, or that video you put on Instagram, and thank you, because you’re the only one who was doing that. It was the first time I really thought, Maybe we can build something out of the ashes of what private equity and other big corporations have done to journalism in America.”

These days, for most data center coverage, the framing is environmental. This may be for any number of reasons: environmental concerns are real; many of us live in already environmentally imperiled communities at a moment of rampant deregulation; environmental stakes can make the tanglings of larger corporate domination, at the local and national levels, more legible. One statistic—reported by the Washington Post, often referenced—is that an email composed with the help of generative AI uses the equivalent of a bottle’s worth of water. More Data Centers, More Environmental Problems? asked the National Wildlife Federation last year. “Even a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town,” wrote the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. A Bloomberg article spotlighted how “AI is draining water from areas that need it most.” “Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door,” announced the New York Times, in an article about Jeff and Beverly Morris, whose house sits a thousand feet from a Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, and whose well ran dry, choked by sediment. “A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day,” the article reported. El Paso’s Meta data center, in its contract with the city, planned to use up to 750,000 gallons per day.

Last year, Bowling investigated the air quality permits filed by the forces behind Project Jupiter, and wrote that the greenhouse gas emissions from the facility would be greater than those from Albuquerque and Las Cruces—New Mexico’s two largest cities—combined. “Pair that with the context that Sunland Park and Doña Ana County have for years had some of the worst air quality in the country, particularly as it relates to ozone, and the greenhouse gases that we’re talking about emitting here are important ingredients in making ozone,” he said. “So will this stand to make already some of the worst air in the country even worse and even more unlivable for people who have respiratory problems and other illnesses? That is a major accountability question.” 

The other local reporters I talked with expressed a sense of resistance, however, to framing data centers as “just” a matter of environmental concern. “You have not seen me covering this as an environmental story,” Haussamen said. “And that’s intentional.” (Even so, Haussamen does publish on environmental subjects, including water use.) Mendoza-Moyers told me that his reporting on the power plants that both the Meta data center and Project Jupiter said they’d use has led him to believe that the environmentalist narrative about their being catastrophic to water supplies and air quality is not fully true. “Is it an environmental story?” he asked. “A little bit. But to me, as I’ve looked into it more, I think it’s almost more like a story of, like, corporate power and these big companies showing up many times in Middle America communities,” he said. “It’s like, hey, these big companies show up, they’ve got the Yale-educated lawyers and the really expensive law firms, and they just kind of outwit, out-negotiate, these local elected officials in Doña Ana County.” The “bigger issues,” he added, are “the power dynamics of big tech companies coming here, to a region desperate for investment in industry, and getting a lot of benefits and tax breaks without really committing to a lot of benefits for El Paso.”

Mendoza-Moyers—who is now pursuing a master’s program in utility economics and regulation at New Mexico State, in order “to know what the hell I’m talking about,” as he told me—sees utilities as an “underappreciated ballet of math and science and finance and all this stuff coming together to improve our lives.” In December of 2025, he published an article drawn from an interview with John Balliew, the CEO of El Paso Water, that broke down the Meta data center’s likely usage statistics. “Everybody—the county and the city—[felt] that this is a good economic investment for the city. Then we went ahead and did what needed to be done,” Balliew said, of the city’s agreement with Meta. “But we can’t do this a lot,” he continued, in Mendoza-Moyers’s article, speaking of the water consumption. “I don’t think we could do another one.” On the El Paso Matters podcast, Mendoza-Moyers interviewed Gilbert Trejo, the vice president of engineering, operations, and technical services for El Paso Water, who similarly asserted that the utility was “in a great spot.” Commenters, on the Instagram and Facebook reposts of these interviews, didn’t tend to believe it.

There are limits and there are potentialities. “I try to put the water consumption into the broader context of the supply we have,” Mendoza-Moyers told me. “I did the math, right? Okay, El Paso Water thinks Meta’s data center use is, like, four hundred thousand gallons of water a day. That’s a decent amount. But in a system that uses a hundred and ten million gallons, you know, that’s less than half a percent. That’s not going to change everything.” (A similar angle was taken in a Grist story digging into Arizona’s water supply and data center water use, where Jake Bittle found not much there there, and quoted Sarah Porter, a fellow at Arizona State’s Kyl Center for Water Policy: “There’s not a hair-on-fire context right now.”) 

Part of the promise from Meta is that its data center is of a kind that actually doesn’t use that much water: if built in the way the company plans, it would use less than, say, a Department of Homeland Security detention center being rapidly constructed in El Paso and meant to “house” eighty-five hundred people, which El Paso Water seems trepidatious about its ability to service. Amid so much degradation to a place and its people, it makes sense, maybe, that promises only go so far—especially those made behind closed doors. To report on the intricacies of these deals requires a nearly unbelievable level of questioning and context.

North of El Paso, in Doña Ana County, sits the Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks National Monument. Haussamen hikes there often: rocks spike vigorously up from the floor of the Chihuahuan Desert, and petroglyphs line the canyons. In his telling, there are some locals who bought land here, built houses, and then advocated for the place to become a national monument so that others couldn’t build there next. “Journalism should be really deeply invested in a community,” he told me. “When you’re not, you tell stories the way that power wants them told. And that can be different types of power. So in this case, it could be the way that BorderPlex Digital and Oracle want the story to be told. Or it could be the way that environmental groups that are primarily concerned about climate change want the story to be told. And it’s not that I reject any of that. It’s that I think telling a story one of those two ways lacks the nuance that is the reality for people who actually live in these communities.” 

Mendoza-Moyers, for his part, has been feeling pessimistic about AI generally, “concerned about the audience’s willingness to engage with a deeply reported story.” He’s thought often of the infamous quiz at the New York Times that polled readers’ preferences: Cormac McCarthy or AI-generated prose? (It’s a nearly even split.) Jokingly, he answered my question about what, infrastructurally, would allow local journalists to cover AI and data center–related news: “If Bill Gates or somebody wanted to give El Paso Matters, like, a hundred million dollars,” he said, “then we could hire ten reporters. That would be cool.” 

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.