Meta Says Post-Midterm Politics Just Made US Data Centers a Tougher Sell

Meta's top brass is watching the midterm fallout and not liking what they see. Speaking Wednesday at the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech conference in Napa, Meta President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick said that after a wave of Republican legislators and governors went down, building data centers in America is going to be harder, according to the Journal.

She didn't stop at harder. Powell McCormick said every hyperscaler is now asking itself whether it needs to build outside the United States, per the Journal, and added that starting fresh data center build-outs on American soil today will be very challenging.

The stakes are enormous. Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Threads back in July that Meta is going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence — and the company has the blueprints to match. One planned facility, Hyperion, would sprawl across an area roughly the size of Manhattan, and it's headed for Louisiana, which stays red.

That's the easy one. Prometheus is slated for Ohio, which is about to get a Democratic governor, and another data center is planned for Texas, also newly won by Democrats. Both governors-elect support some form of moratorium on data center construction, which puts Meta's expansion map squarely in the political crosshairs.

Powell McCormick did offer a note of optimism. She claimed that a new governor-elect who made data centers a central part of their campaign reached out to Meta after the election, saying they should meet right after the inauguration because they don't want to lose the investment or the jobs, according to the Journal.

So the message from Napa is a mixed one: Meta still wants to build big, but the political ground under those projects has shifted. With local leaders now openly floating construction freezes, the company's hundreds-of-billions compute plan may increasingly look overseas.