Zuckerberg Has an AI Empire to Build. Meet the Adviser Who Handles the Details

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg named Dina Powell McCormick president, vice chairman and co-leader of Meta Compute in January, after she resigned from Meta's board about a week following a December board retreat where Zuckerberg asked her to take the internal role. Powell McCormick, a former Trump administration official and Goldman Sachs executive, now handles Meta's AI infrastructure deals, government and financial relationships, and reputational fights, as Meta expects to spend more than $600 billion on its AI buildout before the end of the decade. Meta's chief legal officer CJ Mahoney said Powell McCormick "is generally the last person who's consulted on really important decisions.

Bloomberg -- At a Meta Platforms Inc. board retreat last December, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg asked Dina Powell McCormick to take a walk with him around his sprawling Kauai compound, known as Koolau Ranch. Most Read from Bloomberg Zuckerberg told Powell McCormick, a former Trump administration official and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who'd joined the board eight months prior, that the $1.7 trillion company was banking its future on artificial intelligence. To do that, Meta would need to raise a tremendous amount of outside capital. And Zuckerberg would need a right-hand adviser with the robust connections and political capital required to smooth the way with both financial institutions and governments. "It became clear to me that she could play a bigger role in Meta's next chapter," Zuckerberg recalls. He asked her to trade the board seat for a key internal role. Zuckerberg told her it would be the most important job she'd ever have. A well-connected power player in both Washington and on Wall Street, Powell McCormick has built relationships with a shocking breadth of people including former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink and pop star Katy Perry, and has had plenty of big jobs. But about a week after Zuckerberg's pitch, she resigned from the board. In January, she became president, vice chairman and co-leader of Meta Compute, its effort to build and monetize the infrastructure fueling the AI revolution. Nine months in, Powell McCormick's remit extends far beyond helping to hash out deals for Meta Compute. Interviews with more than a dozen Meta insiders, outside executives and government officials and Powell McCormick herself show she's an executive trusted by Zuckerberg and his top deputies to tackle the company's thorniest problems – including countering the backlash to AI and weighing in on major legal and reputational fights, like Meta's recent settlement of up to $18 billion with state attorneys general over children's safety on Instagram and Facebook. Powell McCormick has appeared for Meta at Davos, traveled with President Donald Trump and an entourage of Silicon Valley's most famous to China and met with King Charles III, freeing Zuckerberg to spend his time in Menlo Park with the engineers and researchers rushing to build Meta's next generation of models. While Zuckerberg, 42, is the cerebral engineering leader obsessed with improving Meta's products for the AI race, Powell McCormick, 53, has her pulse on the world outside of Silicon Valley, and can be Meta's bridge to opportunities and fixer of challenges. "She is a close, trusted advisor of the whole senior leadership team, but especially of Mark," said CJ Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer. "She's generally the last person who's consulted on really important decisions." Those decisions are only going to become more high stakes for the company as it makes its biggest technological and capital bet to date. Meta is expecting to spend more than $600 billion on its AI buildout before the end of the decade, and that's not including the many billions more it's leveraging from Wall Street. At the same time, the public has perhaps more reason to be skeptical of Meta and its ambitions than ever, as existential fears about AI and the data centers needed to support it threaten to dominate public conversation. Over the last week alone, intensifying concerns inside some of the top AI companies have pushed the chiefs of OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and SpaceXAI to call for a swift slowdown of its development. Zuckerberg waited to chime in publicly until after other leaders had spoken, and said Meta was already focusing on building safe AI. But the CEO, with more than two decades of high-profile clashes with governments on privacy and safety, doesn't have a history of winning over public trust easily. That'll be up to Powell McCormick. The Value-Add Born in Cairo and raised in Texas, Powell McCormick seemed a fitting pick for Meta's board when Trump returned to the White House for a second term. The company was seeking to make inroads with the administration and her Washington ties were plentiful. Joel Kaplan, the new chief of global affairs, knew her well from the George W. Bush administration, where she eventually served under Rice. Powell McCormick later became a Goldman Sachs partner, with a talent for working with sovereign clients, and served as a deputy national security adviser in Trump's first administration. Her husband, former Bridgewater Associates CEO Dave McCormick, became a US senator from Pennsylvania in 2025. "Frankly, they haven't had enough conservatives in the tech world," said Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who worked with Powell McCormick during Trump's first administration. "Dina is the right person to be in that role." That was one benefit – but Zuckerberg saw a bigger value-add: Powell McCormick had relationships with some of the world's biggest sources of capital that could help finance Meta's infrastructure boom. On a day-to-day basis, she's helping do the crucial work of laying out Meta's entire approach to AI infrastructure. It's not just a question of how much computing power Meta can secure, but how to acquire it at the right cost to the company, and from whom. Powell McCormick co-leads the team that must solve for those issues. She, along with head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan and Daniel Gross, who is responsible for mapping out the company's future compute needs, meet weekly to plan as far as decades into the future with inputs, including the pricing and longevity of chips, that are continually in flux. Beneath Gross sits a trading-desk-like team that monitors component prices, supply shortages and other factors. "Compute is a very scarce asset," said Powell McCormick, speaking in an interview on Monday from the company's headquarters in Menlo Park. Dressed in jeans and a white button-up — a far departure from her prior Washington uniform of suits and coordinated sets — she blended in seamlessly at the tech company. "It's an asset we can use, obviously, and an asset we can monetize," she added, nodding at reporting, first broken by Bloomberg News, about the company's efforts to potentially stand up a cloud infrastructure business. Meta has been at the center of two of the biggest benchmark deals in the intensely lucrative and competitive chips and data center space: one in rural Louisiana, where Meta is building one of the largest data centers on the planet, and the other, more recently, in El Paso, Texas. Powell McCormick, an energetic conversationalist who remembers people's children's names and is willing to make introductions, already has turned to her Rolodex to help clinch deals and explore new financing structures for these ambitions. Earlier this spring, she took her Meta Compute co-heads on a Wall Street tour to meet with executives of BlackRock, Blackstone Inc., Brookfield and others. Out of these conversations ultimately emerged discussions for potential financing partners for the El Paso project. Leveraging her 25-year-relationship with Larry Fink, who said he values the new kind of "connectivity" that Powell McCormick is bringing to the company, Meta and BlackRock reached a deal to build the $14 billion data center together. Powell McCormick, Fink, Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, and BlackRock CFO Martin Small brought their teams together for more than a dozen calls, which ultimately led the financial firm to raise more than $12 billion in debt to fund the facility. BlackRock will hold an 80% interest in the joint venture, while Meta will retain the remaining 20%. Beyond McCormick's business relationships in New York's power circles, she used her sprawling network, political connections and public policy muscle to jockey for buy-in across Texas, getting everyone from high-ranking state officials to small local utilities on board. Meta used a similar joint-venture structure with partner Blue Owl Capital Inc. to help finance its Louisiana data center, dubbed Hyperion. The setup gives the tech giant control of operations while keeping debt off its balance sheet. Powell McCormick called it a "great model" first set up by CFO Li – and a success she looked to replicate. Some following Meta's strategy are not convinced that it will land with the broader public. Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, said there's a striking disparity between the might and deep pockets of the tech and banking giants, and the amount they're reinvesting in the community where they're planting their AI flag. "I'm struck by the perception of this arrangement being one of Big Tech and Big Finance coming in with a sophisticated cost and risk sharing, and hand waving toward the local bargain question of who pays for electricity, water, infrastructure, and incentives," Kreps said, noting the $14 billion venture will dedicate a $500,000 grant to El Paso public schools. It "just looks like a scale mismatch that exacerbates the perception problems that the community programs are meant to fix." A Building Anxiety Kreps' skepticism gets at a bigger problem: Across the US, Americans are increasingly concerned about AI and the data centers needed to support them, an anxiety that is becoming a defining, bipartisan issue for voters in the looming midterm elections. About 61% of US adults oppose the construction of new data centers in their area, according to a survey conducted this summer by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania – and a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted this spring found that feeling largely transcends party lines. Nearly 40% of American adults see data centers as "mostly bad" for the environment and home energy costs, according to Pew Research Center data from earlier this year, while it found in 2025 that half of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI permeating daily life. "We are facing incredible headwinds at the federal level, the state level, the local level," said Lindsay Elin, Meta's vice president of external affairs, who now leads the community engagement team. Beyond her job as a dealmaker, Powell McCormick plays an important role in protecting "the investments that we're making and to ensure that we can continue to build these data centers that we need," Elin said. Meta's new president has set up brainstorming sessions focused specially on how to change public sentiment toward data centers, which led to the new company tagline, "The future is for everyone," and a $1 billion fund to invest in the communities where Meta builds them, Elin said. Meta, with Powell McCormick's help, is seeking to give "our allies cover to continue to support data center builds," Elin said. Should constituents offer more support, she said, city councils wouldn't feel the need to pass moratoriums. Meta executives said they see Powell McCormick as an effective communicator – and one who can at times be better at communicating outside of Silicon Valley with the broader public than Zuckerberg. He would prefer to be at Meta digging into its most technical product problems, rather than schmoozing and dealing with public backlash, people familiar with the matter said. Zuckerberg, ever since hiring Sheryl Sandberg to be his chief operating officer in 2008, has leaned on an executive in a communicator role to do the political part of Meta's work. As a high-profile woman in Meta's top ranks, Powell McCormick faces the comparison to Sandberg often. While they both had backgrounds in finance and politics and a flair for mentoring – a subject that Powell McCormick has written a book about – Sandberg was more of an operator, taking a promising startup and developing it into a serious global advertising juggernaut. Powell McCormick is taking an industry titan and smoothing out its rough edges, and facilitating deals, one conversation at a time. Meta's partners have become used to working with – and traveling with Trump alongside – Powell McCormick. "She understands what it takes to build — not just the massive infrastructure financing behind AI factories, but the relationships and the vision," said Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, who spent an hour and a half with Powell McCormick talking about how to strengthen the companies relationship when she assumed the new role. She has been the driving force behind new company-backed programs aimed at training and securing jobs for skilled trade workers and pouring resources into communities where Meta is expanding its footprint. By some counts, she has been successful. One of the country's top electricity providers and Meta's closest energy partners, NextEra Energy Inc., announced Wednesday it will hire 1,000 people out of Meta's America's Workforce Academy – an initiative stood up by Powell McCormick – placing trained technicians like electrical workers, pipe fitters and welders on power generation projects across the US, some involving Meta's own data centers. Meta is investing $115 million in the academy in its first year, starting in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana and Texas. Meta is also looking to bring more locals inside the company. Justin Osofsky, the company's chief partnerships officer, said he and Powell McCormick are working together to hire people directly in the communities where it's building data centers. "It's really important that you have people on the ground that understand the culture, the relationships, and how best you can partner within a state," he said. Still, some see the goodwill programs and local hiring as too little too late — inadequate to the task of changing public perception of Meta and the AI industry more broadly. Worries about the long-term impacts of the technology are near boiling over, and data center backlash is poised to become a major issue in the November midterms. "It's increasingly difficult to separate sentiment around Meta's AI strategy from sentiment around the broader AI industry, which continues to show volatility amid questions about the scale, returns on AI investment, and growing concerns about the technology itself," said Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at Emarketer focused on AI and emerging technologies. "I wouldn't say Meta's efforts have been ineffective," he added of the workforce programs, grants and other local investments. "But I haven't seen evidence that they've meaningfully moved broader public sentiment around AI or data centers, where concerns increasingly extend beyond jobs and economic benefits." There are also larger questions from investors about the return on investment of Meta's aggressive AI spending, and how the company will monetize compute. "Her job is to build out the infrastructure, Zuckerberg's is to figure out how to monetize it all," said John Belton, a portfolio manager at the investment management firm Gabelli Funds. "Investors are more for used on that second part." Winning Trust Though Meta is still working to win the trust of the communities it's planting in, as well as its own investors, Powell McCormick has undoubtedly already won the backing of the company's most senior leadership. She is involved in problems big and small, leading some insiders to question where her job begins and ends. Others suggest that's the wrong question altogether: Mahoney, Meta's top lawyer, likened her current role to that of Brad Smith, the vice chair and president of Microsoft Corp., or even a position more akin to her role on Trump's National Security Council. She's a connector, both externally, and internally, bringing together different parts of the company, getting competing power centers to work together and escalating the right problems to Zuckerberg to make sure the company is moving at speed. That mix of skills is working for Zuckerberg: "She has accomplished an incredible amount in a short time since she joined and we launched Meta Compute," he said. "I'm learning a lot from her and she's exactly the kind of leader we need for our next chapter." Powell McCormick feels the weight of the moment – and is watching it play out in Menlo Park, in Texas, in Washington, in Louisiana. She believes Zuckerberg's original pitch to be true: "It will be one of the most important things I've ever done," she said. As the interview continues, the communications executive seated beside Powell McCormick in Menlo Park receives a message – the Meta president is due at Zuckerberg's home for dinner with a small group of senior leadership, known, fittingly, as "small group." As Powell McCormick opines on the importance of baking safety into AI systems, and earning the trust of its users, another ping. Then a man walks out into the courtyard with a yellow Post-It. Not so discreetly, it communicates that Powell McCormick is needed – and now. She's already spent four hours that day in the company of Zuckerberg and his closest advisers, discussing the company's AI ambitions and Meta's annual conference, known as Connect, which will take place next week – the latest flurry of events that has her ping-ponging from coast to coast on a weekly basis. But her presence is wanted again. Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek ©2026 Bloomberg L.P.