The Data-Center Boom Needs Factories, Too. This Texas Plant Is Heading Toward 4,000 Workers
Wiwynn is rapidly growing its manufacturing plant in Socorro, Texas, to support data center infrastructure with thousands of new jobs. This expansion reflects the rising demand for cloud and AI hardware production in the Sun Belt region.
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Before cloud and AI workloads run inside a data center, somebody has to build the servers and racks that fill it. Increasingly, that work is happening in Socorro, Texas.
Wiwynn is expanding its manufacturing operation outside El Paso with Amazon, adding nearly 1,000 jobs by the end of 2027. Employment is expected to exceed 2,500 next year and eventually reach about 4,000 when both buildings at the site reach full production.
For a city of roughly 36,000 people, that would make the plant an enormous employment center. It also reveals a less visible side of America’s data-center boom.
The giant computing campuses being built across Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and other Sun Belt states need another industrial network behind them — factories producing the physical equipment inside.
From 514 jobs to a much bigger operation
Wiwynn first announced its Socorro manufacturing project in 2025 with plans for a $152 million investment and 514 new jobs. A little more than a year later, the scale has changed dramatically.
Wiwynn says its investment in the El Paso-area operation has now surpassed $1.6 billion. The site is the Taiwan-based company’s first manufacturing facility in the United States.
The plant manufactures and integrates server systems and racks for Amazon’s data-center infrastructure.
Those are the large systems that eventually hold computing equipment inside the enormous buildings powering cloud services and increasingly demanding AI workloads.
Wiwynn has been expanding globally as demand for that computing capacity grows. The company reported second-quarter revenue up 26% from a year earlier and has been increasing investment in manufacturing capacity for AI and data-center systems.
What kind of jobs does a server factory create?
The latest expansion includes manufacturing and industrial engineering, testing and automation, equipment maintenance, quality engineering, supply chain and production positions.
Amazon says the jobs pay about 30% above the local wage base. That makes Socorro particularly interesting.
The data-center economy is often discussed in terms of electricity, land and enormous corporate investments. The permanent employment inside an individual data center can be relatively modest compared with the billions of dollars invested in the building.
Manufacturing the equipment for those facilities is different. A plant producing servers and racks needs production workers, technicians, engineers, maintenance teams and supply-chain operations — and it can employ thousands of people in one location.
Why Socorro?
Socorro sits immediately southeast of El Paso, close to Interstate 10 and the U.S.-Mexico border. That gives manufacturers access to the United States while remaining closely connected to the cross-border industrial economy that stretches through El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.
The region has long been associated with logistics and manufacturing. What is changing is the technology being produced there. Wiwynn’s arrival brings data-center hardware into that industrial mix.
The company is also working with the University of Texas at El Paso and other regional schools to develop workers for the expanding operation.
If you’ve been following growth and change around here, these stories are worth a look too.
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