Meta — Papillion, Nebraska AI Data Center

Meta’s data center campus in Papillion, Nebraska — in Sarpy County south of Omaha — is the company’s primary Midwestern AI compute hub and one of its oldest owned facilities. Meta (then Facebook) broke ground in 2011 and has expanded the campus multiple times in response to growing AI demand, particularly for LLaMA model training, Reels content ranking, and Feed and Ads recommendation AI.

The Papillion campus was an early showcase for Meta’s Open Compute Project (OCP) — Meta designed custom servers, cooling systems, and power distribution specifically for this facility and then open-sourced those designs, influencing a generation of hyperscale infrastructure. The OCP-spec servers are significantly more energy efficient than standard rack servers, reducing cooling and power overhead. The campus uses evaporative cooling towers and achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) around 1.07, well below the industry average.

Nebraska’s wind energy resources are central to Meta’s renewable commitments for this campus. Meta has contracted wind power from multiple Great Plains projects, including the Rattlesnake Creek and New Market Wind facilities in Nebraska and Iowa, covering the Papillion facility’s full energy consumption. The campus sits on a high-capacity fiber node connecting Chicago and Denver, providing low-latency connectivity for content delivery and AI inference.

As Meta scales its Llama model family for both research and commercial use, Papillion contributes significant GPU training capacity. The facility runs high-density H100 clusters alongside legacy A100 systems for longer-horizon training jobs. Meta’s Nebraska facility also hosts inference infrastructure for its most latency-sensitive US Central traffic — Reels recommendation, Messenger AI, and WhatsApp features powered by Meta AI.