Watch Live: Meta President Dina Powell McCormick at WSJ Tech | WSJ

That is a good question. Well, first of all, I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. I have to say that, you know, to try to analyze what happened last night, or frankly in any major election, there are just so many different factors. But data centers were absolutely part of many of the campaign ads, and there were many candidates that ran on this issue. And you and I have talked about this before, that yes, the visible sort of manifestation of AI is a data center, and it's something that people can say, 'I don't want this in my community.' I think there's an underlying bigger issue, which is how people feel about AI in general.

In our case, we only go to communities that feel that this investment is going to actually make a difference. And in Louisiana, we've invested and are investing now for 20 years in a little town called Richland Parish. It's a town of 20,000 people that really welcomed this investment. In fact, it really helped us double down on an approach that we have called our community compact. There's five elements to it, and we really believe this has differentiated our ability to build. The first is the electricity issue. People are really concerned about electricity costs going up. In Louisiana, we work with Entergy, and not only do we pay for our own electricity, we are actually reducing the cost for citizens by $2 billion over the course of the investment.

The second is the teachers. And I do have to give the Journal a little bit of credit on this. We actually did not know — we're not part of the government there — that in that parish, any tax surplus that exists goes directly to the teachers in the form of a bonus. The Journal actually wrote about it, and so when we read about it, we said, this seems like a very smart idea, that the people in the communities don't see these data centers as a cost, they see it as a benefit. And so everywhere else, our second part of the compact is we are building a way to actually invest in teachers and first responders who ought to be beneficiaries of a bigger tax base, obviously.

The third, and I think is just so critical, is that the labor force has to remain local. People don't want you bringing in labor. They want you to train the labor, and I know we'll get into this, but we have really created programs that are actually training people locally, and as you saw, people coming back home.

I would say the fourth has been it has to be bipartisan. You cannot build today in a community like that if everyone is not committed to it. And our lesson is that as important as the elected officials are, the way more important people to us are the local citizens, because they are who drives whether or not elected officials want us in those communities. In New Orleans, in fact, when we expanded this program several weeks ago, we had the governor, a Republican, Governor Landry. We had former mayor Mitch Landrieu, former senator Mary Landrieu. And I would say we, I think we're pleasantly surprised to see they put the interests of this investment and the people of Louisiana above politics.

And I think that we might honestly be a path, that at least our path is not only to remain completely bipartisan, of course, but to show that the communities that welcome these investments will have an enormous amount of benefit, and the communities that don't want our investment will have, of course, the right to stop them.

I think we have to double and triple down on telling the story. And Greg and I actually have often talked about this, that the industry has not done as good a job as we needed to to explain the benefits of these investments and to frankly say that we're going as far beyond even now, I think, the original commitments. We've been building data centers — Meta has been building data centers for 20 years. You know, people think data centers really just started, but in order to have the products that we have, it takes a lot of compute power. And so we are in 23 different states. Five of them will have one gigawatt projects and larger, and Texas is one of those.

And I think that, I will be honest, I told Emma, I can't name the person, but we did have a governor that won last night who did make data centers a big part of the platform say, as soon as we get past the inauguration, let's meet because we don't want to lose this investment in our town. We don't want these jobs to go elsewhere. So I think it's going to be harder. I think it has been hard, I should say. But I also think that it's becoming clear what models work, and the states want those models that work because they want the ability to say we've invested, we have these jobs. But there has to be local support.

Well, yes. I think you saw many pieces of referendums on different, you know, in different states around regulations.

You know, I do think there's going to be a lot more review, and there's going to be a lot more focus on do the constituents in these communities want these data centers. And I do think that it's why compute is becoming an even more scarce asset that has not been fully priced, I think, in the market. And what I mean by that is to start new data projects, to start new data center buildouts today in the United States, very challenging. To expand ones that you've already built, more easier because you've had a major track record for a few years and the community has felt those benefits. They haven't felt cost, they've actually felt benefits, and so I think the starting from scratch is going to be challenging.

I can also tell you that every hyperscaler is now thinking about, you know, do we need to build outside the United States because they're enormous investments, and hedging those investments is a wise thing to do. But just in the last week, you may have seen that both in Singapore and in Australia there have been, in essence, almost moratoriums put on data centers. So the future may be international, the future may be space, but right now I think it's going to be challenging, and I think that I believe actually people will come around to saying, here are the benefits we want for you to invest in our community.

I'd have to kill you, Emma, if I told you that. No, I mean, I think there's obviously just a set of criteria that you look for: power, land, you know, the community engagement piece is now as important, to be very honest with you, as many of the elements of the criteria that, you know, you just have to actually have to even consider building a data center there. And these are 20-year, multi-billion dollar projects.

So this is also an area where this is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. People across the aisle have strong views about the issues around safety and regulation. In the matter of, I don't know, eight weeks or so, Mark and I actually did two kind of significant things in this area. One, we met with the Democratic Commission led by Josh Gottheimer, the AI commission in the House, that are extremely, you know, focused on doing, you know, being responsible. As well as, of course, he and Jensen and Greg and Sam and others came together with those White House accords, the superintelligence safety accords.

I have to tell you, there's a lot more, I'm sure, that will come, and there should. There's a huge responsibility for the government to look at this technology and to ensure it's safe for all Americans. But there was a lot of teeth in that accord that I think did not get as much attention. First, at least I can tell you what in our lab the things that we focus on to your question. Mark has from the very beginning believed and seen firsthand that safety is paramount. If people do not believe your product is safe, they are not going to want to use it. It's just as simple as that.

And so we have had a very high threshold in terms of a massive safety platform within the company. Just in the MSL lab, there are over 200 people that their only job is to look at how the models are being developed and to see if there are any incidents and make sure that it's safe. The second layer, though, is that we actually now are going to have an independent board committee that the researchers or lab leaders can go straight to, and that's part of this accord. And so if you feel like you see something that you don't have a way to go to your manager on, you can actually go straight to the board.

The third is there will be an independent auditor to oversee all of these processes, and then of course, you know, frankly, the models themselves catch quite a bit with the algorithms today. So I think the approach that we have taken is that if it's not safe, people aren't going to want to use your product, and so that has to be a massive focus. That actually manifested in why Muse, our product, which we're very excited about, was delayed for over eight weeks because we kept ironing out every bug that we could possibly find. And it was just something that the threshold had to be this is as safe as possible for us to release it.

Actually, there's quite a bit. You know that you just saw that manifested in that meeting, but also in all of us agreeing to those four principles, which, as I say, are very important self-regulations and very important because we're all holding each other accountable. And so there are some areas, frankly, where you see all of the hyperscalers working effectively together. That was unanimously agreed to. You don't find a lot of that in Congress. And so you have the CEOs all unanimously agreed to that set of principles around safety.

It's not quite that much. But well, maybe I'll take a step back and explain, you know, what is that money going to? You know, where is the need for that? You know, people use the word compute, and I know many of you are major investors in sort of the pipeline that is compute, whether that's energy or silicon or chips. But when you're at a company like ours, there is such a multidisciplinary focus on bringing together all the elements that build this horsepower that let you run the products.

So we've built actually a division now called Meta Superintelligence Labs, and we work incredibly closely with our CFO, Susan Li. And it actually is this like big puzzle every day because there's the financing, so there's the capital formation that you're referencing, which investors are really expecting us to have a diversified capital allocation, a very disciplined capital allocation with a diversified mix of that kind of capital. And so that means we're working with BlackRock and many, many of the largest asset managers in the world. In fact, Larry Fink and BlackRock is our partner on the capital.

The second big piece is power and energy. In Louisiana, our power partner is Entergy, and that's who we are going to be working with for 20 years to provide the power to fuel that data center, or NextEra Energy and John Ketchum. The third piece is workforce, and so the number of workers that are needed for these projects is more than two million in the next four years. And so we have a very robust partnership now with Sean McGarvey, the head of the trades, the NABTU and IBEW, the international electricians unions, because that is a piece that you have to manage if you're building out. So the actual physical labor and the workforce training is critical.

And then finally, the community engagement piece. You have to be on the ground listening to the leaders of those communities. So it's incredibly complex, and I think that what we have just seen, even in the last several months, is it's getting harder, and it's taking a whole-of-company approach to bring all these assets together to build this compute and to partner. You cannot go it alone today if you are investing this amount of capital and frankly trying to build this amount of power and energy.

The estimates are astounding. Over the next four years, there have been estimates that there will be $10 trillion of capital needed, 250 gigawatts of power, and as I said, two million new jobs. That are — many of them today, there's a shortage of almost 350,000 electricians today for these sites. So that's the compute piece, and it's a very complicated endeavor.

The capital piece I can just tell you, because we've just in the last couple of weeks gone out to the market for both equity and debt offerings, and both were oversubscribed. I think that we have been able to tell, I hope, a story that we have 3.6 billion with a B people on our platform every day if you account for the reach of all of our products. 200 million small business owners. Six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth in the core business. And maybe most importantly, those investments that we're making, the capex dollars that you referenced, are improving the core business. I think that investors are looking today to make sure that the capital that you're spending is actually making that core business grow. And not all core businesses are equal. We're just seeing that with ours.

You know, Greg was just talking about this. I mean, there is an enormous need for capital. Data points I can share with you are the ones that we just went to the market with, and to have been both oversubscribed in our equity offering. It just closed our European bond offering today. Massive oversubscription with 18 other bond deals in the market. And so the data points right now point to the fact that people are still, you know, interested in investing, and certainly, honestly, with companies that have the balance sheet that we have, where, you know, you see the financial discipline that we're running the company with, and frankly trying every day to say that we are very focused on shareholder value.

You know, compute in itself is an asset. John Gray, of course, who runs Blackstone, just said in the CIO conference a few weeks ago that compute itself is a financeable asset, and that was before last night. So I think those people that actually have built out compute will view it as an asset. We are hoping that Muse is going to take off and that billions of people are going to want to use it, and we need the compute for that. But we also know as it grows, we're getting calls every day to lease that compute. And so one way or another, we're seeing a path to monetization.

You know, I think I've been there what, let's see, two years between my board service and in this role. So I have a lot of humility that I wasn't there for the last two decades when they built products that initially they weren't as sure where the monetization was going to come. Whether you look at WhatsApp and the growth that we're seeing today, Threads just surpassed — monthly users surpassed X with monthly users. Reels was only built five years ago. And so if there's one thing that I've watched Mark do is he is a founder who builds products, but he takes 20 years of experience of what sells to those 3.6 billion of consumers.

And so we see this with Muse, we see this with Wonder, the underlying model, that we believe there is a path to monetization because our track record has really been finding the products that people want and then honestly having connectivity to almost half the world's population.