Meta President Says Building New US Data Centers Will Be Harder After the Midterms, and Every Hyperscaler Is Looking Overseas
Napa — Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president and vice chair, said at the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech conference on November 4 that getting data centers built in the United States is "going to be harder" after the midterm elections. She said "many different factors" played into the Democrats' widespread victories, with opposition to data centers front and center in many campaign ads and exit polls.
"There is going to be a lot more review," Powell McCormick said. "What I mean by that is, to start new data center build-outs today in the United States will be very challenging." Expanding existing data center projects will be easier, she added, because operators have a track record and surrounding communities have felt the benefits.
She also said every major cloud provider is now weighing construction outside the United States: "I can also tell you that every hyperscaler is now thinking about 'Do we need to build outside the United States?' Because they're enormous investments; hedging those investments is a wise thing to do." Powell McCormick, who said she spends 80 percent of her time securing computing power, noted Meta is racing to build enough capacity to run personal agents for its 3.6 billion users.
Meta's giant projects under way include Hyperion in Louisiana, Prometheus in Ohio and a third site in Texas being developed with BlackRock. The governors-elect of Ohio and Texas have both called for conditional freezes on new data center construction. Powell McCormick added that one governor-elect who had made data centers part of their platform told Meta after the election: "As soon as we get past the inauguration, let's meet, because we don't want to lose this investment in our town. We don't want these jobs to go elsewhere."
Her remarks line up with what voters did on November 3: in 41 local ballot measures on data centers across ten states, every restrictive measure passed and every development-friendly one failed, cementing data center siting as a live issue in American local politics.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：Meta 总裁兼副董事长 Dina Powell McCormick（资料图）。照片 CC BY 2.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Meta President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick (file photo). CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
