Wiwynn's Socorro plant aims for 4,000 workers as city wage projection falls

Amazon and Wiwynn expect to create nearly 1,000 advanced manufacturing jobs at Wiwynn's Socorro, Texas, server plant by the end of 2027, taking total employment at the site past 2,500 next year and eventually to 4,000 when both onsite buildings run at full capacity for all customers, according to Amazon's September 9 announcement and statements at a ribbon-cutting at 9220 Socorro Logistics Lane.

The starting point is already sizable. Wiwynn's factory in the Socorro Logistics Center employed 1,330 people at eight months old, the El Paso Times reported in August. Borderplex Alliance chief executive Jon Barela told El Paso Inc. around the same time that the company had already hired more than 1,000 people in the region.

The newest city-backed tranche carries a lower average wage projection than the first phase. Three weeks before the Amazon event, Socorro's council approved a separate Chapter 380 agreement backing a $275 million Wiwynn expansion of server manufacturing and testing tied to 2,000 additional jobs, and the city put the projected average wage for those jobs at $19 an hour plus benefits, El Paso Inc. reported. When the city announced Wiwynn's arrival in June 2025, the average wage attached to that first phase was $26.80 an hour with benefits, against a median county wage of $17.31.

Amazon's announcement says the Socorro roles include positions paying 30% above the local wage base, and Wiwynn is hiring across manufacturing and industrial engineering, testing and automation, quality engineering, equipment maintenance, supply chain and production operations.

Hsu also described where the headcount goes, and it is not all assembly. "Testing is an important part of the whole system integration process," he said. "Because it requires a high degree of quality, we need a large number of engineers and technicians." The expanded work covers graphics processing units, tensor processing units, other specialized chips, and liquid- and air-cooling technologies.

The incentives are conditional and modest relative to the capital involved. The August agreement carries a personal property tax rebate over ten years worth at least about $1.8 million and a construction permit fee waiver of up to $200,000, and it requires that at least 5% of the 2,000 new jobs, roughly 100 positions, go to Socorro residents. "If they don't meet any of those minimum requirements, the incentive package goes out the door," Mayor Rudy Cruz Jr. told El Paso Inc. The 2025 Chapter 380 deal offered up to $1.2 million in tax incentives against a Wiwynn commitment of at least $92 million in personal property and building improvements, with the same 5% local hiring floor.

Amazon frames the plant as its own supply chain story: Wiwynn builds and integrates the server systems and racks behind Amazon's data center infrastructure. Wiwynn's own account of the demand is broader. Joseph Hsu, managing director of Wiwynn's North America operations, told El Paso Inc. in August that growing AI computing demand from companies including Meta and Microsoft was driving the expansion, and that it was not directly tied to data centers being developed in the El Paso region.

For the talent pipeline, Wiwynn is working with the University of Texas at El Paso, New Mexico State University, El Paso Community College and Western Technical College. Amazon says more than 14,500 Texas employees have taken part in its free skills-training programs since 2019, that its Career Choice program partners with 35 Texas educational institutions and prepays full tuition, and that it plans to bring AWS's Fiber Optic Fusion Splicing Certificate Course and a paid Information Infrastructure Pre-Apprenticeship for job-seekers with little or no experience to Texas in the coming months.

Socorro announced the campus on June 3, 2025, as a $152 million investment creating 514 new jobs and retaining 35, across two industrial buildings totaling more than 866,000 square feet. Barela said El Paso beat out the Dallas-Fort Worth area, communities along the Interstate 35 corridor and cities in at least three other states for the initial project, and faced I-35 competition again for the expansion. "We outworked them," he said.

Barela put employment in electronics-related advanced manufacturing across the El Paso region at more than 34,000. Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Rick Switzer, who attended the Socorro event alongside Commerce assistant secretary for export administration Noah Jaffe, described the Wiwynn work as one example of Taiwan's commitment to invest $250 billion in advanced manufacturing in the United States.