OpenAI drops NDAs with public officials and Meta warns of harder data center fights after the midterms
The two companies responded to an election in which voters strongly opposed data center expansion.
AI companies are starting to respond to the midterm elections, in which voters rejected data center projects in almost every ballot measure. The Verge reports that OpenAI announced new commitments to communities where it is building data centers. One is that it will no longer use non-disclosure agreements with public officials on those projects. Such agreements have been a point of friction in local fights over large facilities. Separately, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said at the WSJ Tech conference on Wednesday that the Democratic wins would make it much harder for companies to build data centers, TechCrunch reports. She said the industry has "not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments." She also tied the backlash to wider unease about AI: "The visible sort of manifestation of AI is a data center, and it's something that people can say, 'I don't want this in my community.'" She said Meta hopes to change public opinion by showing the value both of the facilities and of the technology itself. The remarks suggest that large AI developers expect local opposition and closer political scrutiny to shape where and how they build computing capacity.