Democratic Midterm Wins Will Slow US Data Centre Build-Out, Meta President Says

Meta's president and vice-chair, Dina Powell McCormick, told the WSJ Tech conference in Napa, California, that Democratic gains in the midterm elections will make it considerably harder to build data centres in the United States — a direct constraint on the computing capacity that underpins the company's artificial-intelligence ambitions. The warning matters beyond one company's construction schedule: the compute behind AI models and consumer agents is the binding input for Meta and its large cloud rivals, and the politics of siting it have now become a variable in their investment plans.

Powell McCormick said the industry had "not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments," and linked the local objections to wider public unease about the technology itself. "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 said, adding that the underlying issue was how people feel about AI in general. The electoral consequences are already visible in planning: the incoming governors of Ohio and Texas have demanded conditional suspensions of new data-centre construction, clouding two state projects.

Meta is pushing ahead at scale elsewhere. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, has said capital expenditure this year could reach as much as $145bn; the company is building the Hyperion facility in Louisiana and Prometheus in Ohio, holds data centres in 23 states, and has five of its data-centre projects — one of them in Texas — planned at 1 gigawatt or more. Powell McCormick said Meta was reviewing an expansion of overseas investment, arguing that spreading risk by region was rational given the size of the sums involved, and that every large cloud company was weighing whether it needed to build data centres outside the United States.

She described the template Meta uses to close local deals: paying for its own electricity, directing tax surpluses from the facilities to teachers and first responders, keeping the workforce local and securing bipartisan backing. Even so, she expected projects to face more review and to be measured against whether constituents want them. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, has made a similar argument, saying that building infrastructure in states such as Texas and Georgia requires going into communities rather than simply announcing that a project is a good thing. Powell McCormick also said Meta was receiving daily enquiries to lease the compute it has built, giving it "a path to monetization" independent of its consumer agent Muse, which it hopes will scale well beyond its present 10 million users. The sources did not report any announced decisions on specific projects or on overseas locations.