Meta — Forest City, North Carolina AI Data Center Campus

Meta’s Forest City, North Carolina data center campus was one of the company’s first purpose-built data centers and has been operational since 2011. Located in Rutherford County in western North Carolina, the campus has been expanded multiple times and represents a significant chunk of Meta’s Eastern US compute capacity.

The Forest City campus was built to Meta’s early open-source hardware specifications — designs that were subsequently contributed to the Open Compute Project (OCP), which Meta founded in 2011. The facility’s energy-efficient design and custom server architectures became foundational templates for the broader data center industry. The campus is powered by renewable energy from Duke Energy’s renewable portfolio and direct power purchase agreements with solar farms in North Carolina.

Forest City hosts Meta AI training workloads, content delivery infrastructure, and Llama inference capacity for Meta’s North American user base. North Carolina’s affordable electricity rates, available land, and skilled workforce have made it attractive for Meta and other tech companies. Meta has repeatedly expanded the Forest City campus, citing strong demand for AI infrastructure and content serving capacity.