A firm is looking to acquire more than 1,000 acres in El Paso, Texas, for a new data center campus.
The El Paso City Council this week is set to vote on a City ordinance with Wurldwide LLC for the sale of around 1,040 acres of City-owned land.
Wurldwide is set to buy the land – situated in the northeast of the city, north of Stan Roberts Sr. Ave. and west of US Highway 54 – for $8,156.25 per acre, suggesting a price tag of $8.48 million.
Details haven’t been provided, but Wurldwide aims to build data centers on the land.
“Under the proposed terms of the 380 Agreement, Wurldwide LLC will make certain real and personal property improvements necessary to establish a data center,” the contract states. “Total estimated costs to be invested by Wurldwide LLC for real and personal property improvements is $800 million.”
Which company is behind Wurldwide isn’t clear. The shell company is registered in Delaware through real estate services firm Winstead.
El Paso, located in the west of Texas and close to the borders of Mexico and New Mexico, is not traditionally a major data center hub.
Dallas, Austin, and sometimes Houston, all to the east of El Paso, are traditionally more popular with data center developers in Texas. Phoenix in Arizona, to the west of El Paso, is also a large data center market.
According to the El Paso Times, the land was acquired by the city from the El Paso Public Service Board more than a decade ago and set aside as a possible site for an automotive manufacturing project that never materialized. There was more talk of a potential manufacturing user for the site around 2019, but again nothing came to fruition.
