# Meta's president says the election made data centers harder to build, and AI's image is the real problem

> Dina Powell McCormick says the industry failed to explain data centers to voters, and that people really object to AI itself. Meta is now selling communities on paying its own power bill.

- URL: https://devisdead.ai/news/meta-s-president-says-the-election-made-data-centers-harder-to-build-and-ai-s-im
- Published: 2026-11-06T12:55:13Z
- Author: DevIsDead Newsroom
- Section: Policy
- Tags: meta, data centers, midterms, muse
- Originally reported by TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/05/metas-warns-that-election-backlash-against-data-centers-could-make-ai-expansion-harder/).

Meta has seen the election results and drawn a conclusion other AI companies have been avoiding: people don't just dislike data centers, they're uneasy about AI. Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said as much at the WSJ Tech conference, Sarah Perez reports for [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/05/metas-warns-that-election-backlash-against-data-centers-could-make-ai-expansion-harder/).

## "It's going to be harder"

Powell McCormick said the Democratic wins will make data centers a lot harder to build, and admitted the industry hasn't done a good enough job explaining what the investments are worth. Her read is that a data center is simply the most visible form of AI, the thing people can point at and refuse to have in their town, and that the deeper issue is how they feel about AI in general.

Meta has been building data centers for 20 years. It has them in 23 states, and five of its planned projects, including one in Texas, are 1 gigawatt or larger. The company now worries it could lose some of that investment after candidates ran and won on anti-data-center platforms.

## Meta's playbook

Her description of what works is basically a checklist of what voters demanded. In Meta's successful deals, the company pays for its own electricity, steers any tax surplus from the facility to teachers and first responders, hires locally, and lines up bipartisan support. She expects more scrutiny from here, with projects judged on whether residents actually want them.

She also framed Meta's pitch in human terms, saying Mark Zuckerberg is "long human" and is betting on people more than machines, and that AI should be democratized and accessible in a fair, transparent way.

## The hedge

Meta's big AI bet is its consumer agent Muse, which has 10 million users today and which Meta hopes will one day serve billions. If that doesn't happen, Powell McCormick says the compute won't be wasted: Meta gets calls every day from people wanting to lease it.

That's a telling backup plan. It suggests the data centers are valuable whether or not Meta's own AI products take off, which is a harder argument to make to the town next door. Coming the same week [OpenAI promised to pay its own power bills](/news/a-day-after-voters-turned-on-data-centers-openai-promises-to-pay-for-its-own-pow) and publish its water use, the industry's message is converging: voters set the terms now.

**[Scoreboard](/scoreboard) update:** Humans +1. Meta admits voters' unease about AI will make its data centers harder to build.

Stay undead.