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Over 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 a clear mission: win over viewers on the construction of new data centers. As the New York Times reports, the ad campaign is anchored by short, folksy video spotlights on Meta’s data centers in Altoona, Iowa, and Los Lunas, New Mexico.
The ads make the case that Meta’s data centers create jobs, revitalizing rural communities.
However, they take a fairly idealistic tone. For instance, the Altoona ad portrays a town on the brink of disappearing, but thanks to Meta’s data center, its residents get to meet up at local diners and attend football games. The Los Lunas ad similarly shows data center employees having cookouts 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. The Financial Times reported this week that 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.
However, the recent winter storm that swept the country only highlighted the strain the power grid is already under, including areas around large data centers.
For Meta, and competitors like Microsoft and Google, these sprawling data centers are critical for powering AI, but public sentiment on them has been souring. Many communities are pushing back against the construction of new data centers, united across the political divide by concerns about skyrocketing energy costs and water use. These movements have caused delays and cancellations for billions of dollars’ worth of data center investments across the nation, like now-canceled buildouts in Oregon, Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, and Virginia.
