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Dina Powell McCormick, a former senior official in Donald Trump’s first administration, is joining Meta as president and vice president, focusing on its AI infrastructure investments.
Powell McCormick, who spent 16 years in senior roles at Goldman Sachs, is joining the tech giant’s management team after serving on its board of directors last year. She was Trump’s deputy national security adviser during his first term and also served in the administration of George W. Bush.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Powell McCormick will work with existing executives Santosh Janardhan and Daniel Gross on a new initiative called “Meta Compute,” focused on building “hundreds of gigawatts” of AI infrastructure over the coming decades.
Building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs billions of dollars and draws electricity equivalent to the output of a nuclear reactor.
In the wake of Trump’s 2024 election victory, Zuckerberg publicly courted the president, relaxed Meta’s moderation policies to assuage Meta’s fears over censorship, and appointed Republican allies to key positions. Internally, Republican operative Joel Kaplan was promoted to chief global affairs officer. Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend of Trump, was also appointed to Meta’s board, as well as Powell McCormick.
The banking giant’s appointment to the new strategic role comes as Zuckerberg invests billions of dollars on building “personal superintelligence” to compete with AI rivals like OpenAI and Google.
As part of the pressure, he has increased Meta’s spending on expensive AI infrastructure and dealmaking, while casting the White House’s moves as a potential boon for the US economy.
Meanwhile, the company is scaling back investments elsewhere, such as loss-making efforts to build a ‘metaverse’ filled with avatars.
A person familiar with the matter said Zuckerberg plans to cut about 10 percent of jobs this week in Meta’s Reality Labs department, which oversees the development of its virtual reality headsets and other Metaverse initiatives.
Meta said Powell McCormick will help manage its data centers and energy investments. She will also “strive to find innovative ways to form new strategic capital partnerships and expand our long-term investment capacity”. The company is “building the large-scale physical and financial models that will power the next decade of computing”.
Zuckerberg said on the threads that, as part of the Meta Compute initiative, Powell McCormick will also work on “partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in, and finance meta infrastructure.”
Last year, the company began making complex financial transactions to pay for data centers and chips that will power its AI models, tapping corporate bond markets and private creditors.
Meta last week announced deals with two nuclear power start-ups, Oklo and TerraPower, to help its expansion into energy-intensive AI. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright unveiled the deal.
Trump welcomed the appointment of Powell McCormick, who is married to Republican Pennsylvania senator and former Bridgewater executive Dave McCormick.
“A great choice by Mark Z!!! He is a brilliant and very talented individual who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!” The President posted on Truth Social.
Zuckerberg also said on the threads that Gross, an AI entrepreneur and investor he hired last summer, will lead a new group that will explore how the company should plan its computing capacity in the long term, as well as partner with energy suppliers.
The New York Times was first to report about Meta’s plans to cut its Reality Labs team by 10 percent.
