Meta and OpenAI executives say data centers must now win over the towns that host them

Executives at Meta and OpenAI said at the WSJ Tech conference that data-center projects now have to win over the communities that host them, after data centers were on the ballot in the US midterms, the BBC reported. Meta said it expects building to get harder.

Two executives, one conclusion from the same week

Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president, spoke at the conference on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported. She said the visible form of AI is a data center, and that "it's something that people can say, 'I don't want this in my community.'" She added: "I think it's going to be harder."

OpenAI president Greg Brockman said at the same event, on Wednesday evening in Napa, California, that everyone had been surprised by the reaction to data centers, according to the BBC. "You can't just tweet and say: 'This is going to be good.' You need to be in those communities," he said.

What Meta says works in a town

Powell McCormick told the conference that Meta has built data centers for 20 years and now has them in 23 states, five of them planned as projects of 1 gigawatt or more, including one in Texas, TechCrunch reported. She described the approach Meta uses to close deals locally: paying for its own electricity, directing tax surpluses toward teachers and first responders, keeping the labor force local and seeking bipartisan support.

She also said she expects projects to be reviewed more closely and weighed against whether constituents want them. Meta is not counting only on its own AI products to justify the spending: "We're getting calls every day to lease that compute [we've built], and so one way or another, we're seeing a path to monetization," she said, according to TechCrunch.

The politics behind the remarks

The BBC said Democrats ran campaigns to slow the growth of data centers and AI, with dozens of measures on ballots around the country aimed at restricting their development, and that Democrats won both the Senate and the House. It added that Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on a moratorium on new construction in the sector. Senator Bernie Sanders posted on X on Thursday: "NATIONAL DATA CENTER MORATORIUM NOW," the BBC reported.

The Guardian reported that US voters also rejected data centers in a series of local ballots, and that analysts expected Democratic governors to clamp down on the rollout of new data centers. Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo, told the BBC that "there is a difference between supporting AI development and allowing infrastructure to expand at any cost or pace."

FinanceInTime covered Thursday's market selloff separately. The reports do not show how many of the planned projects any pause would affect.

We would watch the local terms, not the national slogans

We think the executives' remarks say more about where the cost of AI growth is moving than about whether it will continue. Power, tax revenue and jobs are being settled town by town, and Meta's own list suggests the price of a permit is rising: its own electricity, a share of tax benefits for public services and local hiring.

The opportunity is that projects with clear local benefits and cross-party backing may face less resistance and so be easier to finance. The threat is that spending which runs ahead of revenue meets slower approvals at the same time. We expect more developers to publish community terms in the coming months if more states weigh pauses. We would change our view if the pauses prove narrow and projects continue to be approved on the old timetable.

The view in this final section is FinanceInTime's editorial opinion, for information only. It is not investment, tax, legal or other advice, and it does not take your circumstances into account. Forecasts are uncertain and past results do not guarantee future ones.