Dina Powell McCormick, Meta president and vice chair, speaks during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria show, Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Meta has data centres in 23 states, and five of them are planned at 1 gigawatt or more. Her comments came a day after Democrats won statehouses in Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Michigan, all key states for data centre sites.
“As soon as we get past the inauguration, let’s meet,” the governor told her. They said they did not want to lose the investment, adding, “We don’t want these jobs to go elsewhere. Opposition to the facilities featured heavily in campaign ads and exit polls, according to WSJ. She said Meta has a working formula for local support.
Meta president Dina Powell McCormick expects the US midterm results to make data centres harder to build. She also thinks some of the politicians who campaigned against them may be more willing to talk than their speeches suggest. The incoming governors of Ohio and Texas have both called for conditional freezes on new construction. Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has pledged to halt new projects until protections for residents are in place. Expanding existing sites is a different matter. Communities that have hosted Meta’s facilities for a few years have felt the benefits rather than the costs, she argued. The company pays for its own electricity, directs tax surpluses towards teachers and first responders, hires locally and seeks backing from both parties.
Powell McCormick spoke with WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker at the WSJ Tech conference in Napa on Wednesday. She said one governor who won on Tuesday, after making data centres a major campaign issue, contacted Meta soon after.
The company is racing to build enough computing power to run Muse, its personal AI agents, for its 3.6 billion users. It plans to spend up to $145 billion in capital expenditure this year, WSJ reported. Investor Brad Gerstner estimates that up to 35% of US data centre construction planned for next year could be at risk.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged public concerns over water use during an internal Q&A and floated the idea of building in the desert, according to WSJ. The stakes are high for Meta. Its biggest projects include Hyperion in Louisiana, Prometheus in Ohio and a third site in Texas being built with BlackRock. Two of those three now sit in states with incoming governors who favour a pause. Meta is not the only one reworking its plans. OpenAI has since pledged not to make public officials sign nondisclosure agreements during data centre talks. Anthropic, in its IPO filing, warned investors that local moratoriums could delay or block the facilities it depends on for compute.