Meta spends millions convincing people that data centers are great and that you love them

Over the last few months of 2025, Meta spent $6.4 million on an advertising campaign running in cities across the country, from Sacramento to Washington, with a clear mission: to attract viewers to the construction of new data centers. as New York Times Reports, the advertising campaign is based on short, popular videos highlighted in Meta’s data centers Altoona, Iowa, and Los Lunas, New Mexico.

The ads explain that Meta’s data centers create jobs and revitalize rural communities.

However, they take on a somewhat idealistic tone. For example, the Altoona ad depicts a city on the verge of extinction, but thanks to the Meta data center, its residents can meet at local restaurants and attend football matches. The Los Lunas ad similarly shows data center employees eating out 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 Data center operators, including Digital Reality, QTS and NTT Data, are planning a “lobbying campaign” to defend the new data centers in response to the public backlash, it reported this week.

However, The last winter storm The surge that has swept the country only highlights 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 essential to powering artificial intelligence, but public sentiment toward them has been soured. Many communities are Hold back on building new data centersunited across the political divide by concerns about High energy costs And water use. These moves caused delays and cancellations of billions of dollars in investments in data centers across the country Construction now cancelled In Oregon, Arizona, Missouri, Indiana and Virginia.