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Meta<\/a>\u2019s hard and early pivot into artificial intelligence<\/a> hasn\u2019t exactly gone as planned, with tens of billions of investment dollars sunk into middling models, departmental restructurings, and clashing visions. In technical terms, the company remains an AI also-ran. In another way, though, it\u2019s emerging as an industry leader: It\u2019s spending a ton of money on politics.<\/p>\n Regarding regulation and national law, firms like Meta are, for now, in reasonably good shape. They have an administration that\u2019s broadly deregulatory and specifically pro\u2013AI industry and has mostly limited its threats of intervention to complaints<\/a> about \u201cwokeness\u201d \u2014 a problem for a company like Anthropic, perhaps<\/a>, but maybe less so for ones like Meta that preemptively ponied up and fell in line<\/a>. Plenty of money will be spent by the AI industry on national politics, of course (OpenAI president Greg Brockman recently became<\/a> a Trump PAC megadonor),\u00a0but for now, AI firms are pushing further into state and local politics and Meta is spending a lot. According<\/a> to the New York Times:<\/p>\n Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives \u2026 Political operatives tied to A.I. interests have focused this election cycle on state capitols out of concern that states were developing a patchwork of laws that would stifle A.I. development.<\/p>\n This, says the Times, is \u201cthe biggest election investment by Meta\u201d so far and is focused, to start, on supporting AI-friendly Republicans in Texas and Democrats in Illinois. Meta isn\u2019t alone here: A fleet of new PACs backed by other AI firms is funneling money into local and state elections across the country.<\/p>\n What are these companies lobbying for, exactly? Their needs fit imperfectly into two categories. First, they want to fend off direct regulation of how AI products are built, used, and deployed. That includes avoiding \u201ctransparency<\/a>\u201d laws that often include risk audits, whistleblower protections, and frameworks for ensuring AI \u201csafety,\u201d in both the catastrophic and child-safety senses of the word. In this fight, AI firms have a useful ally in the federal government, which has been actively pressuring state lawmakers to drop the issue, most recently in Utah<\/a>.<\/p>\n Closer to the ground and a bit further from the national political discourse, for now, is the matter of data centers. Much of the money AI companies spend on AI \u2014\u00a0raised from investors, their own balance sheets, and, more recently, bond sales \u2014\u00a0goes into buying GPUs and leasing or building structures in which to put them. These structures then need huge amounts of power coming from either the grid or newly constructed generators of one type or another (if you\u2019re xAI, this means standing up gas turbines without permits; if you\u2019re Meta, this may look like partnering directly with a nuclear power plant). In addition to the staggering power needs, data centers use a lot of water. And despite their eye-popping costs to build and run, they barely create any jobs. For the sorts of communities being approached with these projects \u2014\u00a0places that may be persuaded to accept the mixed prospect of hosting an Amazon warehouse or, say, a massive new ICE detention center<\/a> \u2014\u00a0AI data centers are uniquely unappealing. As a result, they encounter local resistance from across the political spectrum. According to the Financial Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n Over the past year, the White House has courted tech billionaires and gone out of its way to protect the AI industry\u2019s agenda, fast-tracking permits for data centre construction and approving the sales of advanced chips to China while cracking down on states\u2019 attempts to regulate chatbots \u2026 But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology.<\/p>\n Data centers offer an almost perfectly sympathetic NIMBY cause. They\u2019re a drain on local resources, straining infrastructure and driving up utility prices. They exist to support a technology about which people are fairly pessimistic across the political spectrum. They\u2019re pitched as investments in an exciting future, but that future will unfold elsewhere while your town, now designated as an infrastructural non-place, is just stuck with a big jobless box that uses more power and water than everyone else combined.<\/p>\n The surge in local lobbying isn\u2019t about winning this argument \u2014\u00a0good luck with that! \u2014 so much as it\u2019s about getting as much done as possible while the companies still can, buying support at the state level and breaking ground in as many municipalities as possible before data-center backlash becomes a universal condition of local politics in America. AI firms always talk about how they\u2019re in a technological race with one another or against China in which every day counts. But they\u2019re also in a race to take advantage of a brief domestic political moment during which they\u2019re relatively unencumbered and haven\u2019t yet been metabolized into American politics. At the national, state, and local levels, this may be as good as the AI industry will ever have it. And ahead of the midterms \u2014\u00a0not to mention the prospect of 2028 \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s lobbying like it\u2019s running out of time.<\/p>\n Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts<\/p>\n Get an email alert as soon as a new article publishes.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n