Meta’s warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder

Meta President Dina Powell McCormick said that the Democratic wins in the midterm elections are going to make it a lot harder for companies to build data centers, adding that the industry has “not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments.”

Speaking at the WSJ Tech conference on Wednesday, the Meta exec pointed out that the backlash against data centers — which was very much on the ballot during this election season — was also tied to people’s feelings about AI technology 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,’” 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 the negative consumer sentiment around AI if it’s able to demonstrate the value, not only of the data centers coming to local communities, but in 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.