Long-term data center plans shape Meta’s local investments

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 10:20

   I think that that ends up being very important. So if you look at the data centers, what we've actually found is that when a company like Meta goes into a community and makes a commitment that we're going to invest there for decades, which is really what we're doing when we're building up a data center, We're able to make it so that it's very good for the community. I mean, the kind of the tax revenue that they bring from that.

2. 10:45

   I mean, in Louisiana, we have this example where like the tax revenue fund did these $50,000 bonuses for teachers in the community. We bring a lot of jobs. We invest in the local community a lot. That, I think, can be good. I think that there's also a lot of speculation, right, where there are companies that aren't necessarily planning on running a data center for decades. They're just trying to find a plot and then trying to sell it to one of the big labs and they don't really care as much about the local community and they're not invested for the long term.

3. 11:16

   So if they don't care to focus on making it work for the local community, then, of course, people are going to get upset. So that's one of the things that can be difficult when you have these kind of speculative – I don't even know if I'd call it a bubble because that implies that it's overvalued or something. But there's certainly a boom, right? So you have that. I mean, that leads to some of these short-term thinking incentives that don't necessarily lead towards helping every stakeholder, which I think is kind of what you need to do to make this sustainable over the long term.

4. 11:50

   And at the end of the day, I mean, if we're creating a technology that, like, if it doesn't create jobs or doesn't create broad-based prosperity or the infrastructure that we're building doesn't help local communities... That's not going to be allowed to continue. So it has to, of course, you have to design it in a way that can be helpful to people in all these ways, which is also part of the reason why, for people who are skeptical or have so much doom about the whole thing, one of the things that I basically think is that if we don't end up building it in a way that's positive, it just effectively won't be able to happen.

5. 12:24

   So, I kind of think like actually establishing the right checks and balances and distributing the benefits of this widely is sort of a precondition for being able to scale in the way that I think would be best for society over time. I haven't heard another tech CEO in your position talk about data centers that way, like the long-term investment of it. Is this something, is this how you've always thought about it?

6. 12:49

   Is this something you feel like there's more clarity that's been brought to it for you recently? Well, I mean, I think that there's been all this anti-data center sentiment that you're talking about. So we've dug into it because what we're trying to understand is, okay, like there isn't as much of that around our project. So why is that? And then so we ask a bunch of people. It's like, well, it looks like there's a pretty big dichotomy between these speculators and the companies that are focused on it for the long term.

7. 13:16

   And that kind of makes sense when you think about it. So, I mean, one thing that we're doing, I mean, there's this America's Workforce Academy project that we did, which is basically, okay, we're going to build all these data centers. We're going to be doing this for a while. There isn't the volume of skilled tradespeople that you need to create this. So, we need more, like, fiber technicians and electricians and, like, advanced carpentry and all of these things.

8. 13:38

   And there aren't enough people to do this. We need hundreds of thousands, you know, maybe millions of more people who can do this. And people aren't trained to do that right now. So we created this training program to effectively do that, where we guarantee people who get through the training program a job at a place that is working on building infrastructure for Meta. And why did we do this? I mean, it's like, it's not really philanthropy, right?

9. 14:06

   It's like, we need those people to be skilled and have those skills. So it's just, it's a win-win. It's an investment that I think makes sense if you're in it for decades, but not necessarily something that you would do if you were building out one site with the intent of flipping it to a different company. So I think that a lot of problems in the world do just naturally get solved by incentive alignment when you think about them over the long term.

10. 14:32

    So I think that that ends up being an important part of this.