Meta warns post-election data center backlash will make AI expansion harder

Meta President Dina Powell McCormick said at the WSJ Tech conference on November 5 that Democratic wins in the midterm elections will make it harder for companies to build data centers, adding that the industry has not done a good enough job explaining the benefits of those investments.

She tied the backlash directly to how people feel about AI overall: "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.'" The deeper issue, she argued, is sentiment toward the technology itself.

Data centers were indeed on the ballot this season. TechCrunch reported that politicians ran on anti-data-center platforms, leaving Meta worried that some of its investments could be at risk. Powell McCormick's assessment was that building will get harder, but that it is also becoming clear which models work, and that states want those models.

Her description of a working model was concrete: Meta pays for its own electricity, directs tax surpluses from the facilities toward teachers and first responders, keeps the labor force local, and seeks bipartisan support for each project. Communities only want a data center when it benefits them in some way.

On scale, Meta has been building data centers for 20 years and now operates in 23 states, with five projects planned at one gigawatt or more, including one in Texas. Those numbers explain why local politics has become a genuine variable in AI capital spending.

The more interesting thread was monetization. Powell McCormick said the company gets calls every day from parties wanting to lease the compute it has built, so even if Muse does not scale as hoped, the capacity itself retains value — recasting data centers from cost center to rentable asset.

What to watch next is the pace of permitting. She expects projects to face more review and to be weighed against whether constituents actually want them. Other companies expanding compute will likely borrow Meta's community-benefit template, but whether it works in states with stronger anti-data-center sentiment remains untested.