Among all the disruptors of 2025, artificial intelligence looms large. Even New Mexico, often on the fringes of major upheavals, if not completely ignored by them, is getting in on the action.
Most recently in the news has been the selection of a site in Santa Teresa for Project Jupiter, a $165 billion data center that will be part of the Stargate AI venture led by Open AI and Oracle. Earlier in the summer, I wrote about another billion-dollar investment in geothermal energy development to power AI data centers operated by Meta.
Drilling down from the macro level, at the micro level, my own firm has also been incorporating more AI technology into our offerings. My company is a strategic communication, content creation and change management firm; AI is touching all of these services in some ways.
Here’s my first takeaway: AI is neither a significant creator nor destroyer of jobs. At the macro level, data centers don’t really create jobs. In its agreement with Doña Ana County, in exchange for not having to pay property taxes or gross receipts taxes, the Stargate project promises to employ 750 full-time workers once the center is operational, and 2,500 workers in its construction.
The former number looks to be a stretch. According to a February Wall Street Journal story, the first Stargate Center being built in Abilene, Tex., will ultimately employ about 100 people. That’s on the high side for data centers. Nonetheless, more and more data centers are being built; and that is ticking up job numbers a bit.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment at data centers has grown from 306,000 Americans in 2016 to 501,000 Americans in 2023. In New Mexico, data center employment has grown 82.6% over the same period; however, even with the Meta data center in Los Lunas, which opened in 2020, New Mexico has less than one percent of data center employment nationwide in its 22 data centers.
The work I do requires humans to power the creative and intellectual capital our clients look to us for. AI amplifies and accelerates our work in some cases. In other words, AI makes my company more productive.
In some cases, we ask clients if they would like an AI solution – with creative products, the look and feel of AI can be obvious and it is not to everyone’s taste. Not every designer or strategist in the company cares to use AI. We are open to clients when it is used. To us, it’s simply another option in our toolbox.
In many ways, the AI revolution is much like the “invention of the internet” some 25+ years ago, followed by “Web 2.0” ten years later. Those two breakthroughs fueled American productivity, and our national GDP has soared. Using Google to look things up and email to speed up communication didn’t kill American jobs; it made American workers more efficient. Increased productivity grows profits and creates jobs and opportunity.
(In fact, once this technology merged with cell phones into the smartphone, things got a bit grim – when do Americans stop working? I’m writing this column on a day when I texted my business development director at 4 this morning so he could take care of an end-of-Federal-fiscal-year contracting matter. Sorry/not sorry, Jon.)
As with many breakthroughs, there is a catch. AI requires tremendous amounts of power. The Jupiter Project center in Santa Teresa will require one gigawatt of power to operate, more than a third of El Paso Electric’s total generating capacity. The Jupiter Project intends to construct a natural gas plant to power its microgrid and also construct a battery array, which implies an eventual transition to wind or solar.
The thornier issue for New Mexico is water. To be part of the AI revolution, we need to find some. Our state has the least amount of surface water as a percentage of land mass of any other state. And we are in a historic drought. This year, Valencia County updated its agreement with Meta to lower its maximum annual water usage level to 500 acre-feet or nearly 163 million gallons.
The Jupiter Project in Doña Ana County looks to be more water efficient. The developers plan a closed-loop system that will require 2 million gallons of water to fill up on a one-time basis to cool the servers before being continuously recirculated. The microgrid’s simple-cycle natural gas turbines will use less water than conventional gas turbines and require about 20,000 gallons of water a day.
The Jupiter Project, while unlikely to create 750 permanent jobs, does seem on track to be a lighter water and power burden than a data center launched just five years ago. And Meta is moving ahead with its own innovation via a $1.2 billion geothermal power plant for its next data center expansion in New Mexico.
While AI is likely neither the job destroyer nor creator it has been hyped to be, AI is driving powerful economic forces. For years we have groused about the need to diversify New Mexico’s energy economy; the tech titans appear to be jump starting it in a meaningful way.
If only Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Ellison and Sam Altman could figure out how to spontaneously generate water from emissions generated by stupid social media posts, we’d really be onto something.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican for 36 years, she became an independent upon reading the 2024 Republican platform. She lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and one of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.
