Meta's Dina Powell McCormick: The Case for Data Centers, Backlash, AI Job Boom & Meta’s Future

There is a transformation in humanity coming. Nothing can stop that now with this technology. 3.5 billion people every day are on Meta. I think we all know that the next three years could be the whole game. Women are the secret sauce. How about that?

See you. Thanks for coming out.

That'd be great. I mean, I just want to say so psyched to be at the All-In Summit, first time to speak, and as long as this episode and panel gets way more listeners and views than Senator McCormick did when he came on, I'll be very, very happy with that. So now we can roll the tape. No competition.

I do. Come on out. Come on out, Sheldon and Susan. We have the superintendent from that video, the superintendent in Richland Parish.

Sure. What an honor. It's an honor for me to be here with Sheldon and Susan. We've spent a lot of time in Louisiana. It's our largest data center investment for Meta, and I've been with them in Louisiana. And what is remarkable to me is just the leadership that frankly the governor has shown. Susan is the commerce secretary for Louisiana, the economic development secretary, and Sheldon, who I'm going to let him speak for himself, but he is such an inspirational figure there. And he is the one that realized that because of our investment the tax surplus would go straight to teachers, and maybe you can talk just a little bit about that.

Yeah. I think to the superintendent's point, Louisiana was a little bit late to the data center game, which has actually worked remarkably well to our benefit in that the Meta investment was the first one in the state. And because of the partnership, the way we negotiated the deal, I call it a partnership, not a negotiation, frankly, all along. The community, when we first brought the idea, even prior to you knowing, superintendent, the community wasn't apprehensive because there was a great deal of unknown. Now, keep in mind this was now about 20 months ago is when we started the conversation there. So the chatter wasn't as much as it is now. But you're talking about a community that was really starved for opportunity. As you saw in the video, we had lost population. The average wages in Richland Parish were roughly $36,000 to $38,000 a year prior to this investment. So the data center went to a place in Louisiana, a Mississippi River Delta parish that was obviously longing for this opportunity, and we got ahead of that, and I think we got ahead of that very wisely in the way we addressed both the concerns, the impact on the community, the good impact on the community, and the natural resources and all the things we're hearing.

I think our governor would actually.

Yeah, Chamath, you said this was going to be easy. No, no, no. Yeah, clearly, we're all people, right? We all hear, we all have the same concerns. Again, some of it was that we got very lucky with the timing of all this because those issues were addressed before they became in the public forum of issues. Number one, this was farmland. This was agricultural land. And early on in the conversations with the Meta team, they made a decision to use a more expensive but more efficient system that actually uses less water than was being used on that land when it was being farmed. Right? It's not a statistic you hear very often. The second piece about the energy, clearly we're hearing it across the board, but there are two really critical components to this. Number one is that Louisiana has abundant natural gas. We have about 32,000 miles of natural gas pipelines in Louisiana today if we don't add another mile. So we have access to natural gas everywhere. But in the relationship that Meta created with Entergy, the energy provider there, from day one, before this was an executive order from the president or even the governor, Meta paid for its own generation. It paid for grid resilience. It paid for grid upgrades. It paid for storm costs. Louisiana has storm assessments when we have hurricanes. It happens every now and then. It's paying for storm costs in a state where they didn't operate right when these hurricanes hit. So it's actually taking burdens off of the Louisiana consumer. So all those issues were issues and they were addressed with the original negotiated deal. And I will say it's really why it's become the prototype for how we move forward with others.

Sure. Well, I think first the questions that Jason raised are really legitimate questions. And I think we start with a premise that if a community doesn't want one of our data centers, they get to choose. They get to decide. But that we actually have to upfront and way more aggressively explain what our investment and partnership means. And we have a compact, a compact that Susan and Sheldon are describing. First, not just pay for your own electricity, make sure that you're working to drive electricity costs down. The second is the water issue. It's very real in farmlands and rural communities, but there's absolutely now new technology, in fact AI-driven technology, that makes you able to actually increase water consumption. The third is the teachers. I'll be very honest, this was not our idea. This actually happened because this law allows or in fact mandates that every extra dollar of tax surplus goes directly to the teachers, and the superintendent was telling me things that just are so remarkable. Used to have a hard time recruiting teachers. Now his phone is ringing off the hook throughout Louisiana, teachers wanting to come there, and this may end up being the best school district in the entire state. And now we have taken that learning and we're investing in teachers and first responders. And you saw of course the economic development impact for small businesses. That's our compact everywhere we go. Meta makes sure that we do those things. But to answer your question, Chamath, I don't think that our industry has done a good job communicating, just flat out, we have to do a better job. But before you can communicate anything, you've actually got to be meaningful and have real impact. And so we've started with the premise that we want to be the best actor and the best partner possible, and now having frankly the impact that we see in Louisiana. We're very proud of the impact we're having in Texas and Ohio, but I think we have to tell these stories more. And I know you're alluding to where is this information coming from. I was just with Chairman Cotton and Vice Chairman Mark Warner and the intelligence committees. They do believe they have evidence that our adversaries are trying to gin this up. I can't comment on that, but what I can tell you is if you wanted to stop America right now, what would you do? This is exactly what you would try to do. If you were any of our adversaries, you would want us to stop building data centers in the United States so that we would not be on a path to being AI dominant in the world. This is what you would do. So whether they're doing it or not, this is definitely an approach you would take. And I actually said to them very respectfully, these are great jobs and the communities that want the jobs, want the teacher bonuses, want these investments should be allowed to have them, and those that don't should opt out. But we certainly don't want our companies, my company and our peers, to start thinking about not building data centers.

Sure. So even in our site in Louisiana, one of the issues is that we just can't find enough workers, and you really need a set of obviously welders and pipe fitters and construction workers, electricians. But there's something that every data center site really needs: fiber technicians, the people that just actually lay and cut the fiber. And we just could not find enough people. And so we just made a curriculum and we partnered with a few people, CBRE and others. And we realized that this program just didn't exist. So we decided if you can do it for fiber technicians, why not go beyond? It's a five-week fast-track training program where you get all of your safety training. You get designated something called job site ready, so you can get the job. We at Meta guarantee you a job if you graduate on one of our data center sites and you have that certification with you, whether you want to stay at our site or elsewhere. And the missing piece is that while there are, as David Sachs has said over and over again, 500,000 open jobs for these roles over the next couple of years, but there was this gap between people actually getting those jobs. And it's because it turns out if you're a waitress or you're an Uber driver or you are a home healthcare worker, you live paycheck to paycheck. You cannot afford to take that time off unpaid. The training is weirdly very expensive, OSHA training and things like that. And what if you do that and you don't get a job? So we launched America's Workforce Academy. We launched it, I don't know, four months ago. 40,000 Americans applied. We've graduated 250 people.

And we have a 90% retention rate. So people that are getting into these contractor jobs on our data center sites, you can see they've learned a new trade, they've left behind a job that wasn't as fulfilling, and that of course every company that's hiring them is just thrilled. It's also something that's interesting, David, that you and I talked about, which is we have partners across the board in this program. We didn't put Meta in the name because we are so excited to be working with other companies that are interested in recruiting these workers as well. But we're working with the unions. Sean McGarvey, the head of the trades, NABTU, is a friend and we made a great partnership with him there. Some of those workers are on union sites, some are non-union. But an interesting voice that has emerged in this debate is the unions. The union leadership now is saying, 'We want to be the anti-data center backlash. These are our jobs. These are for our people.' And so they actually put out even before the midterms a note saying they are only going to support candidates that support data centers.

You know, all of us are working on this. In fact, I just talked to Ruth Porat at Google. She's done an incredible job on workforce and she's actually brought together, we're going to join this alliance. Larry Fink at BlackRock has joined the alliance. She's bringing together other companies. You know, we might compete on models and products, but we don't want to compete on people. We as an industry, I think, are doing this part well where we're really working together because anybody that gets trained to work on a Meta data center site can certainly go to a Google site or a Microsoft site. And so this is a place where we've really come together.

Yeah.

Yeah. And we started four months ago and now we're literally getting calls from Mary Barra at GM, 'I'd like a thousand employees.' You know, once you have the curriculum and the certification and the partners to deliver it, you can do these everywhere. We're doing them in community colleges, VFW halls. In that particular program, you actually have to have a site that's kind of like a model data center so that you can show how to train the fiber technicians. But we're working with the Association of Builders and Contractors. They have thousands and thousands of places across the country where they operate.

I think the thing that we unlocked is that we actually pay during the training what you would get if you are already in the job. It used to be that there's a very low fee or an apprentice fee for so long that it wasn't the full payment of the job. And so we do that from the beginning. And then of course these jobs. I mean, David and I have been in Pittsburgh with some of these workers and you know, these are jobs. Welders make $120,000 a year in Pittsburgh. That is meaningful great work. And I think the unlock that we're very proud of with this program is that there just wasn't a clear and fast path to getting on the job site and to having a guaranteed job.

Where are your Meta glasses, Jason? I gave you such.