Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said the data center backlash that shaped races across the country during the midterm elections will make it harder for technology companies to keep building the infrastructure behind their artificial intelligence ambitions. Speaking at the WSJ Tech conference on Wednesday, she said Democratic wins in the midterms are going to make it a lot harder for companies to build data centers, and conceded that the industry has “not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments,” according to TechCrunch.
Her remarks amount to one of the franker public assessments from a major AI builder about the political cost of the buildout, coming days after candidates who campaigned against local data center projects won office.
Powell McCormick Links the Data Center Backlash to AI Anxiety
Powell McCormick argued that opposition to individual projects is a proxy for a much broader unease about the technology itself. The data center, she said, is simply the part of AI that residents can see and point at.
“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.”
TechCrunch reported that Meta believes it could turn around negative consumer sentiment around AI if it can demonstrate value, not only from the facilities arriving in local communities but from the technology itself. Powell McCormick framed that case in expansive terms, invoking Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
“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.”
Twenty Years of Buildouts and Gigawatt-Scale Plans
Pushing back on the idea that Meta is a newcomer to heavy infrastructure, Powell McCormick said the company has been building data centers for 20 years, because the compute power required to run its social networking products has always been substantial. She said Meta now has data centers in 23 states, and that five of its planned projects — including one in Texas — are sized at 1 gigawatt or more.
Those gigawatt-scale figures are the ones that have drawn the sharpest local scrutiny, because they place utility-scale electricity demand next to existing residential and commercial ratepayers. Public opposition has been building for months; a database of public comments on proposed projects reviewed earlier found more than 90% of submissions were negative.
What Meta Says Makes a Project Survive Local Review
Powell McCormick said the company has learned which arrangements communities will accept, and that the lesson is straightforward: residents only want a data center when it delivers something back to them. According to TechCrunch, the terms Meta uses to close deals in local communities include:
- Meta paying for its own electricity rather than shifting costs onto other ratepayers
- Directing any tax surpluses generated by the facility toward teachers and first responders
- Keeping the labor force local
- Securing bipartisan support for the project before it proceeds
“I think it’s going to be harder,” Powell McCormick said of the future of building data centers. “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 she expects projects going forward to face more review, and to be weighed against whether constituents actually want them — a shift that would move approval decisions further toward local politics and away from state-level incentive packages.
Energy and Climate Pressure Behind the Data Center Backlash
The data center backlash is not only about land use. The electricity demand attached to AI infrastructure has become its own flashpoint, with analysts warning that the sector’s growth could erase years of US emissions reductions if new generation does not keep pace. Meta’s pledge to pay for its own power speaks directly to the ratepayer complaint that has animated much of the local organizing against new sites.
Muse, Leased Compute and Meta’s Fallback Plan
Meta has pinned its hopes on its AI investments, particularly its consumer AI agent Muse, which TechCrunch reported has 10 million users today and which the company wants to scale into a business serving billions. Powell McCormick indicated Meta does not consider the spending wasted even if that growth does not arrive on schedule, because the compute it has built carries value on its own.
“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.
A Political Problem the Industry Now Owns
The thrust of Powell McCormick’s comments was less a defense of Meta’s record than an acknowledgment that the companies building AI infrastructure have lost the argument locally. By her own account, the industry failed to explain what communities get in return, and the result showed up at the ballot box. Whether the package Meta describes — local hiring, self-funded electricity, tax revenue steered to schools and emergency services, bipartisan buy-in — is enough to blunt the data center backlash will be tested project by project, in front of the newly elected officials who campaigned against it.
