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

Why does it matter? Because a single data center just raised teacher salaries $45,000 — and the people trying to stop the next one may not be acting alone.

Richland Parish, Louisiana: median wages $36,000, population bleeding out, a superintendent who knew his best graduates weren't coming back. Meta built a data center. Teachers are now cashing $50,000 bonus checks — up from $10,000 the prior year. Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president and vice chair, brought the superintendent and Louisiana's commerce secretary to the All-In Summit, along with considerably darker intelligence about who's funding the opposition.

• A 260% sales tax spike translated directly into $45,000 net raises for certified teachers • Senate Intelligence chairs Cotton and Warner believe adversaries are deliberately stoking the backlash • Meta broke the trade-job access trap by paying full wages during training — not apprentice rates • Trade unions now withhold endorsements from any candidate opposing data centers

One data center turned a $10K teacher check into $50K — and Richland Parish can't answer its phones

Sales tax collections peaked at 260% above normal once construction ramped up. December 2025: teacher checks doubled from $4,000 to $8,000. June 2026 — first full year of peak collections — teachers received $50,000 checks. Prior year: $10,000. Net gain: $45,000.

Superintendent Sheldon sat in his car after the first Meta meeting in summer 2024 and said out loud: "The game has changed." His district, where wages averaged $36,000 and the best graduates reliably left for other cities, is now the most competitive teaching destination in Louisiana. The phones won't stop.

Senate intelligence chairs believe foreign adversaries are funding America's data center backlash

The most efficient way to halt U.S. AI dominance isn't a military operation — it's a permitting campaign. McCormick told the room that Chairman Cotton and Vice Chairman Warner "do believe they have evidence that our adversaries are trying to jin this up."

She couldn't detail the intelligence. The framing was enough: if you wanted to stop America right now, this is exactly what you'd try. Viral single-source claims, overnight community organizing, the dirty-water-bottle clip circulating on X. Apply the same skepticism you'd give any suspected influence operation.

500,000 trade jobs sit unfilled because nobody was paying full wages during training

Welders in Pittsburgh earn $120,000 a year. The jobs exist. The gap: five weeks of near-zero apprentice pay that a waitress or home health aide can't survive — with no job guarantee on the other end.

Meta's fix: pay full job-rate wages during training from day one. Forty thousand Americans applied within four months of launch. Two hundred fifty graduates. Retention rate: 90%. McCormick's frame: the income-replacement model is the unlock, not the training content itself. Any workforce program that skips this step fails for the same structural reason.

Trade unions have flipped: they now endorse only candidates who back data centers

The last politically durable coalition against data center expansion just switched sides. Union leadership is now publicly "anti-the anti-data center backlash" — their phrasing — and announced before the midterms they would only support candidates who back data centers.

Any politician calculating that opposing infrastructure is a safe populist play needs new math. Organized labor is now on the other side of that vote.

Meta's Louisiana data center uses less water than the farmland it replaced

The site was agricultural land before Meta arrived. The company chose a more expensive but more efficient cooling system — one that uses less water than the crops that were there before. McCormick: "It's not a statistic you hear very often."

Meta also paid for its own power generation, grid resilience upgrades, and Louisiana storm assessments — costs that would otherwise hit consumers in a state where it doesn't operate retail. The industry's mistake has been fighting specific community concerns with industry-wide averages. Richland Parish is the rebuttal.

Meta's teen screen deal: $5B more and a one-hour cap — conditional on YouTube and TikTok joining

Jason got the settlement figure wrong; McCormick corrected him on the spot. The real offer: Meta agreed to give "an additional $5 billion and to go down to only one hour of use on our platform if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap join." Hard defaults already in place — 2 hours daily, full shutoff at night, no school-day notifications for under-18s — are just the floor.

The whack-a-mole problem is real: content syndicates across platforms, so a unilateral cap just redirects teens. Any platform that declines is making that choice visibly.

Zuckerberg's rebuttal to Amodei: distributing AI to 3.6 billion people is the safety hedge, not the risk

Zuckerberg's counter to Amodei's safety-first essay, as McCormick delivered it: distributing AI to 3.6 billion people leads to "a more stable society" — direct inversion of the centralized-labs-as-safety-valve argument. The first American open-source model is the proof of direction.

Two of the most consequential AI companies hold opposite catastrophe-prevention theories and are both acting on them at scale. Capital allocation, product decisions, and regulatory positioning all flow from which framework you accept. The split is now explicit and unavoidable.

The real contest isn't compute — it's permits, narrative, and who moves first

Everything McCormick laid out converges on the same uncomfortable fact: the infrastructure race is already being fought in permitting offices, community college parking lots, and Senate intelligence briefings — not just GPU clusters. If adversaries can stall the buildout through domestic sentiment, better chips aren't required. America has one counter-move that demonstrably works. The question is whether it scales fast enough.

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Topics: data centers, AI infrastructure, Meta, workforce development, rural economic development, Louisiana, teen screen time, AI safety, open source AI, trade unions, wearables, geopolitical competition