DeKalb Times

Sen. Dave Syverson (R-Rockford) visited the Meta Facebook Data Center in DeKalb in April to see how it’s expanding.

“They had the dream of creating an environment that would be welcoming to data centers,” Syverson wrote on Facebook. “With legislation passed and our reliable energy, it is now becoming a reality.”

Syverson and Rep. Jeff Keicher (R-Sycamore) worked with DeKalb County Economic to pass legislation that led to the construction.

The company announced its initial plan for the DeKalb data center in June 2020, proposing an $800 million project in northern Illinois that would require about 100 operational employees once complete.

The county’s school district Superintendent Minerva Garcia-Sanchez told FOX 32 that she’s hoping the new center will add opportunities for her students.

Slated to open next year, the five-building complex filled with servers and other computing equipment will create 200 jobs and power everything from Facebook posts to Instagram photos as one of 17 Metadata centers across the U.S.

The Chicago Tribune wrote the range of future employees will include technicians, electrical engineers and culinary staff.

On April 27, Meta announced the expansion of the DeKalb Data Center, in a Facebook post. It read in part:

“Today we are announcing the expansion of the Meta DeKalb Data Center. This will more than double the square footage of the data center from two buildings to five. With this announcement, this data center represents a total investment of more than $1 billion in DeKalb and Illinois. We’ll keep construction workers on-site for years to come, and at the completion of the work, we will support over 200 operational jobs at the DeKalb Data Center."