Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech conference in Napa on Wednesday, Meta’s President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick said that after the crushing defeat of numerous Republican legislators, governors, and other elected officials, it’s “going to be harder” to build data centers, according to the Journal.
“I can also tell you that every hyperscaler is now thinking about ‘Do we need to build outside the United States?’,” Powell McCormick added.
Meta is trying to build multiple huge data centers. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote on Threads in July that his company is “going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.”
The planned facilities are huge. A graphic Zuckerberg posted online shows a data center that would cover most of Manhattan Island east-to-west, and from southernmost Harlem to about SoHo north-to-south.
That building, called Hyperion, would be built in Louisiana, which will remain red. Another, called Prometheus is meant to be built in Ohio, which will soon have a Democrat governor. Still another, meant to be built in Texas, would also be in newly conquered Democrat territory.
But Powell McCormick clarified, according to the Journal, that “to start new data center build-outs today in the United States will be very challenging.”
She also claimed that a new governor-elect who “did make data centers a big part of their platform” told Meta sometime 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.’”
The governors-elect of Texas and Ohio both support some form of moratorium on data center construction.
