Facebook is beefing up its infrastructure to support the next 1 billion users.

To get there, the company announced on Tuesday it is building a massive wind-powered data center in Fort Worth, Texas.

Construction is already underway on the project, which will consist of three 250,000-square-foot buildings sprawled across the 111-acre site. When the Fort Worth data center comes online in late 2016, it will be 100% powered by 200 megawatts of wind energy and cooled using outdoor air instead of air conditioners.

Ken Patchett, Facebook's director of data center operations, wrote in a post that the data center would help improve the social network's growing global infrastructure, which supports Facebook on desktop and mobile, as well as Internet.org, the Facebook-backed service that aims to bring free Internet to people in emerging markets.

The Forth Worth data center should play a major role then in shoring Facebook's global ambitions. The social network has 1.5 million users — more than half the number of global Internet users — and continues to grow. Meanwhile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year he would like Internet.org to be available in 100 countries by the end of this year — a feat complicated by backlash in countries like India, where critics argue the initiative violates the principles of net neutrality.

Many data centers are energy hogs, and companies from Apple to Facebook to Google are working to ensure that their new facilities don’t add to their environmental footprint. However, nationwide, there are about 3 million data centers in the United States, amounting to about one center per 100 people.

According to DOE statistics, data center electricity use doubled between 2001 to 2006, from 30 to 60 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and stood at about 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity as of 2013. This amounts to about 2% of all U.S. electricity use and climbing.

The Forth Worth data center will be Facebook's fifth data center (and fourth in the U.S.), joining facilities in Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina and Sweden. The social network also said it plans on creating at least 40 jobs in Fort Worth to help boost the local economy.