In the last few months of 2025, Meta spent $6.4 million on an ad campaign running in cities across the country from Sacramento to Washington, with one clear mission: to win over audiences on the construction of new data centers. In form of new York Times According to the report, the ad campaign has been powered by short, popular video spotlights on Meta’s data centers Altoona, Iowa, and Los Lunas, New Mexico.
The ads highlight that Meta’s data centers create jobs, revitalize rural communities.
However, they adopt a fairly idealistic tone. For example, the Altoona ad depicts a town on the brink of extinction, but thanks to Meta’s data center, its residents get a chance to meet at local dinners and attend football games. Similarly, the Los Lunas ad shows data center workers cooking with their families rather than moving away to find work.
And Meta isn’t the only company trying to convince the public to embrace the data center boom. financial Times Data center operators including Digital Reality, QTS and NTT Data are planning a “lobbying blitz” to campaign in defense of new data centers in response to public backlash, reports this week said.
However, the recent winter storm that hit the country has already highlighted the strain on the power grid, including in areas around large data centers.
For Meta and competitors like Microsoft and Google, these massive data centers are critical to powering AI, but public sentiment toward them is deteriorating. Many communities are opposing the construction of new data centers, united across political divides due to concerns about rising energy costs and water use. These movements have led to delays and cancellations of billions of dollars of data center investments across the country. Buildouts now canceled In Oregon, Arizona, Missouri, Indiana and Virginia.
