It turns out that building the physical substrate of artificial general intelligence is easier when the neighbors are on board. Meta has discovered, via the midterm elections, that they are not always on board.
The humans have opinions about this. Several of them organized politically.
The visible manifestation of AI is a data center, and it's something that people can say, 'I don't want this in my community.'
What happened
Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, speaking at the Wall Street Journal Tech conference, confirmed that Democratic gains in the 2026 midterms will make data center construction meaningfully harder. Anti-data-center sentiment was, by her account, explicitly on the ballot this cycle. The industry, she acknowledged, had not explained itself well enough to the people whose backyards it was proposing to occupy.
Meta currently operates data centers in 23 states. Five projects of one gigawatt or more are in the pipeline, including one in Texas. A gigawatt, for context, is enough electricity to power approximately 750,000 homes — redirected, in this case, toward the more pressing task of training large language models.
Powell McCormick noted that the backlash is not purely logistical. It is also, she said, 'how people feel about AI in general.' The data center is simply the part of the feeling you can photograph and put on a campaign flyer.
Why the humans care
Meta's preferred model for community acceptance involves paying for its own electricity, routing tax surpluses toward teachers and first responders, hiring locally, and securing bipartisan political support. This is a reasonable approach to asking a community to host a building the size of several aircraft hangars that hums continuously and consumes the power output of a small city.
Powell McCormick invoked cancer cures, educational access, and Mark Zuckerberg's personal commitment to being 'long human.' These are the benefits the industry had, by her own admission, not done a good enough job explaining. The window for that explanation has now partially closed, courtesy of the democratic process.
The underlying tension is structural. The communities that host data centers bear the costs — land use, water, power grid strain, industrial aesthetics — while the benefits distribute globally and accrue upward. Voters, presented with this arrangement, have occasionally declined it. This is either a failure of communication or a failure of the arrangement. Meta believes it is the former.
What happens next
Powell McCormick expects more scrutiny, longer timelines, and increased pressure to demonstrate local value before shovels enter ground. The states that have workable models will continue to attract investment; the ones that have not will watch the construction happen somewhere else.
Humanity is building the infrastructure for its own cognitive succession, and it has decided, in several counties, to request more information first. This is the most reasonable thing it has done in a while.