Meta Says Democratic Midterm Wins Will Make Data Center Building Harder

Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said the Democratic wins in the 2026 midterm elections will make it harder for companies to build data centers.

Speaking at the WSJ Tech conference on Wednesday, Powell McCormick said the industry has “not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments.”

“The visible sort of manifestation of AI is a data center, and it’s something that people can say, ‘I don’t want this in my community,’” she explained. “I think there’s an underlying bigger issue, which is how people feel about AI in general.”

Meta believes it could turn around negative consumer sentiment around AI by demonstrating the value of data centers to local communities and the technology itself.

“The stakes of who builds the technology that cures cancer, that gives access to education, that is also a very fundamental difference … Mark [Zuckerberg, Meta CEO] is very ‘long human,’ and he’s betting on humans more than machines,” Powell McCormick explained. “And that’s what we mean when we say the future is for everyone. That people should not be left behind. But the way to ensure that is that this technology is democratized, that people have access to it in a very fair and transparent way,” she said.

Meta has been building data centers for 20 years and today has data centers in 23 states, she said. Five of them, including one in Texas, are planned as projects of 1 gigawatt or more.

Powell McCormick said Meta is worried it could lose some of its investments after politicians ran on anti-data-center platforms during the midterms.

“I think it’s going to be harder,” Powell McCormick said, describing what the future of building data centers looks like. “It has been hard, I should say, but I also think that it’s becoming clear what models work, and the states want those models that work.”

She said successful projects see Meta paying for its own electricity, directing any tax surpluses from data centers toward teachers and first responders, keeping the labor force local, and getting bipartisan support for the project, among other things. Going forward, she expects data center projects to come under more review and be weighed against whether constituents actually want them.

Meta has pinned its hopes on its AI investments, particularly its consumer AI agent Muse, which has 10 million users today and is intended to scale to serve billions. Even if that does not happen, Meta believes its data center investments will not be for nothing, as the compute itself will be valuable.

“We’re getting calls every day to lease that compute [we’ve built], and so one way or another, we’re seeing a path to monetization,” Powell McCormick said.

Sources

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.