Meta chairman Dina Powell McCormick said Democratic victories in the midterm elections will make it much harder for companies to build data centers, adding that the industry “isn’t doing as good a job as it needs to to explain the benefits of these investments.”
Mehta, speaking at the WSJ Tech conference on Wednesday, noted that the backlash against data centers (which was heavily on the ballot during this election cycle) is also tied to people’s feelings about AI technology as a whole.
“The tangible manifestation of AI is the data center, where people can say, ‘I don’t want this in my community,'” she explained. “I think there’s a bigger underlying issue, which is how people feel about AI in general.”
Meta believes that negative consumer sentiment toward AI can be reversed if it can demonstrate the value of the technology itself, not just the data centers deployed in local communities.
“The bet on who will build the technology to treat cancer and give access to education, that’s also a very fundamental difference… Mark[Zuckerberg, Meta CEO]is very much a ‘long man’ and he’s betting on people over machines,” Powell McCormick explained. “And when we say the future is for everyone, that’s what we mean. That people shouldn’t be left behind. But the way to ensure that is that this technology is democratized and that people have access to it in a very fair and transparent way,” she said.
The executive also touted Meta’s experience building data centers, saying the company has been doing so for 20 years because delivering its products in the social networking space requires a lot of computing power. He said the company currently has data centers in 23 states, with five planned for projects of 1 gigawatt or more, including one in Texas.
But Meta is now concerned that it could lose some of its investment after politicians ran on anti-data center platforms during the midterm elections.
“I think it’s going to get even more difficult going forward,” Powell McCormick said of what the future holds for data center construction. “I have to say it’s tough, but I think it’s becoming clearer what models work. States want models that work.”
Specifically, she explained that a community only needs a data center if it benefits the community in some way, and described the approach that Meta currently uses to close data center deals in local communities.
Successful projects have seen Meta pay its own electricity bills, direct tax surpluses resulting from the data center to teachers and first responders, keep the workforce local, and gain bipartisan support for the project.
She expects there will be more consideration of the data center project and whether voters actually want it.
Meta hopes its AI investments, particularly its consumer AI agent Muse, will one day become a business serving billions of people, well beyond the 10 million users it has today. But even if that doesn’t happen, the company believes that computing itself has value, so investing in data centers is worth it.
“We’re getting calls every day that want to lease the compute[we’ve built]so we’re starting to see a path to some form of monetization,” Powell-McCormick said.
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