Dina Powell McCormick on Meta's AI Data Centers

In Richland Parish, Louisiana, a school superintendent named Sheldon once sat in his car after a meeting, turned on the air conditioning against the summer heat, and told himself the game had changed (05:30). He was right. Within two years, the parish's share of sales tax collections rose from a normal five or ten percent to as high as two hundred and sixty percent at peak (06:27), and a teacher's annual sales-tax bonus check jumped from about $10,000 to roughly $50,000 (07:31). The cause was a single capital project: Meta's largest data center, built on land that used to grow crops.

That story, told on stage at the All-In Summit by Meta president and vice chairwoman Dina Powell McCormick, a former deputy national security advisor and presidential advisor to Donald Trump, is the frame for a bigger argument. Data centers, the buildings full of servers that run artificial intelligence, poll badly with the American public. Powell McCormick's job is to explain why a technology most people distrust is quietly rewriting town finances in places like Richland Parish, and why some of that distrust may not be entirely organic.

The superintendent and Louisiana's commerce secretary, Susan, joined her on stage to walk through the mechanics. Six taxing bodies split parish revenue, and the school board's cut is 51 percent (06:27). As construction and staffing at the site ramped up, that revenue stream, tied by state law to teacher salaries, ballooned. The land itself, Powell McCormick noted, now uses less water under Meta's cooling system than it did as farmland (13:08), and Meta pays for its own power generation and grid upgrades in a state that already has 32,000 miles of natural gas pipeline (13:30). Louisiana's governor has since built an executive order around the deal, treating it as a template for future negotiations rather than a one-off.

Not every community gets this pitch, and not every community should say yes, Powell McCormick argued. But she pushed back hard on the idea that the backlash against data centers is simply grassroots skepticism. She had just met with the Senate Intelligence Committee's chairman and vice chairman, Mark Warner among them, who she said believe adversarial nations are helping stoke opposition to American data center construction.

"If you wanted to stop America right now, what would you do? This is exactly what you would try to do." — Dina Powell McCormick [17:09]

Whether or not foreign interference is real, her point stands on its own: slowing US data center construction slows US progress toward what she calls AI dominance, and any actor with an interest in that outcome would want the public turned against these projects. She was careful to separate this from legitimate local objections about pollution, water, or electricity costs, which she said Meta tries to address before they become public fights rather than after.

The other half of Meta's economic pitch is a labor problem. David Sacks has said there will be 500,000 open infrastructure jobs, roles like electrician, welder, and fiber technician, over the next couple of years (22:11), and Powell McCormick said the bottleneck isn't interest, it's that people living paycheck to paycheck cannot afford unpaid training. Meta's answer is America's Workforce Academy, a five-week program covering safety and OSHA certification while paying trainees at the wage level of the job itself, not an apprentice stipend. Forty thousand people applied in its first four months, 250 have graduated, and the program has a 90 percent retention rate (22:30). Welders trained through programs like this can earn $100,000 to $120,000 a year in Pittsburgh (25:43).

"We at Meta guarantee you a job if you graduate on one of our data center sites." — Dina Powell McCormick [21:41]

Notably, Meta didn't put its own name on the program, because it wants Google, Microsoft, and other data center operators recruiting from the same pipeline. Google's Ruth Porat and BlackRock's Larry Fink have joined a broader alliance, and union leadership, including NABTU's Sean McGarvey, has become an unlikely ally, framing data centers as union jobs worth defending rather than a threat.

Teaching the App to Turn Itself Off

The conversation's sharpest turn came when cohost Jason Calacanis raised Meta's $17 billion child-safety settlement, the second-largest in US history after the tobacco industry's. Powell McCormick, who has been at Meta eight months and on its board for a year, disputed the framing but detailed what the company actually agreed to: a settlement with 52 bipartisan attorneys general across US states and territories (29:00). Under it, any account belonging to someone under 18 shuts off automatically after two hours of daily use, shuts off entirely at night, and receives no notifications during the school day. Parents can override these defaults, but they are now the starting point rather than an opt-in.

Powell McCormick, a mother of six daughters, added a conditional offer: Meta would cut the daily limit to one hour and contribute an additional $5 billion if YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat adopted the same rules (30:07), since teenagers who lose access to one app simply migrate to another. Cohost Chamath Palihapitiya called this a "Whac-A-Mole problem" for parents managing usage across platforms, and David Sacks, while defending Meta against what he called a partial legal shakedown by trial lawyers, agreed the new defaults were a real improvement.

Glasses, and the Case for Giving the Code Away

The lighter half of the conversation turned to hardware. Meta's smart glasses, built with Ray-Ban parent company Luxottica, now include a feature called Conversation Focus, which uses AI to isolate one voice at a dinner table and mute background noise (36:39), plus real-time translation of spoken language and signage (37:02). Powell McCormick argued that after two decades of failed face-worn computers, from Google Glass to early VR headsets, artificial intelligence is what finally makes the form factor worth wearing every day (39:47).

The most affecting example she gave involved blind military veterans in Austin, Texas, who used the glasses to have text and scripture read aloud to them, and, in one case, to place a phone call to a son without needing help for the first time (39:00 to 39:47). It's a small use case, but it points at something larger about who benefits when AI capability gets built into ordinary objects rather than locked inside a lab.

That's the pitch behind Meta's open-source strategy too. In the wake of an essay from Anthropic's Dario Amodei arguing for tighter AI safety regulation (41:41), Powell McCormick described Mark Zuckerberg's opposing bet, laid out in his own essay, The Future Is for Everyone: that distributing powerful AI models widely, rather than concentrating them, produces a more stable society, because more individuals and small businesses gain access to tools that were previously out of reach (43:01). Meta, she noted, released what she called the first major American open-source AI model a few weeks before the summit (43:25).

"The democratization of artificial intelligence will actually lead to a more stable society." — Dina Powell McCormick [43:01]

Whether that bet pays off is an open question, one the industry will spend years testing in public. But the throughline across a rural Louisiana school district, a five-week welding certificate, a two-hour phone limit, and a pair of camera glasses is the same: Meta is trying to prove that AI infrastructure earns public trust the same way it earns anything else, not through an essay, but through a paycheck someone can see and a rule someone can feel working.