Facebook wants to build a $1B data center facility in Fort Worth, Texas

Social networking giant Facebook has submitted a proposal to build its fifth data center facility in the world, this time in Fort Worth, Texas.

Facebook has not yet announced the news. And a spokeswoman declined to comment on rumors. But local and state documents suggest it’s Facebook.

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The investment in the data center facility will total $1 billion, according to one property tax document (PDF) on file with the state of Texas that connects the provisional business entity Winner LLC DBA Ernst LLC with Facebook’s name.

The law firm representing the applicant, Fenwick & West, has previously represented Facebook on major deals like the Oculus VR and Instagram acquisitions. And the architectural (Sheehan Partners), structural engineering (Peoples Associates), and mechanical engineering (AlfaTech) firms listed on the project’s site plans, on file with the city of Fort Worth, have all worked on at least one Facebook data center in the past.

Publicly traded Facebook has picked up more and more users over the past several years, and along the way it’s built out data centers: in Prineville, Ore.; Forest City, N.C.; Altoona, Iowa; and Luleå, Sweden.

Equipment and entire buildings tuned to the needs of Facebook’s applications have helped save the company more than $2 billion over a span of three years.

Improvements over the years have even helped Facebook postpone the construction of additional data centers. But now it appears that Facebook is ready to start building again.

[Hat tip to the Dallas Morning News for figuring out the connection between Winner LLC and Facebook. Incidentally, the rendering the paper obtained is exactly the same as the one VentureBeat published in an article about Facebook’s Iowa data center.]

Update on July 7: Facebook officially announced that it would in fact build a data center in Fort Worth.