The ad began with a panning shot of Altoona, Iowa, a city of 20,000 near Des Moines. The camera moved from a diner to a farm to a high school football field. As the guitar strings were plucked, a voice-over touted a boon to the local economy.
“We are creating jobs here,” the ad said. “For us and for our next generation.”
The ad’s popular appeal was not directed at a political candidate. They were intended for a data center Meta was building in Altoona, part of an advertising campaign by the Silicon Valley giant to create a new narrative around the massive computing facilities that power artificial intelligence.
Meta, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have embarked on a construction boom in the AI competition, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in building data centers to develop the technology. In doing so, they have fueled an increasingly political problem as President Trump and lawmakers across the country criticize the computer sites for driving up energy costs and straining local water supplies.
According to data from AdImpact, an analytics firm, Meta spent $6.4 million in November and December to run a series of ads – including the one about Altoona – in the television markets of eight state capitals including Sacramento, Salt Lake City and Tallahassee, Florida, as well as Washington, DC.
Meta most likely bought the ads “with the goal of influencing policy decisions” and reaching lawmakers, said Michael Beach, chief executive of Cross Screen Media, a marketing analytics firm.
Other technology giants also want to influence public opinion on data centers. Amazon is helping fund a similar advertising campaign in Virginia, where the company operates dozens of data centers. The campaign, which focuses on job growth and electricity costs, began in December 2024 and is still ongoing, supported by Virginia Connects, a nonprofit organization founded by the Data Center Coalition, an industry group.
Steve Padilla, a Democratic senator in California who proposed a bill last year to regulate the rising energy costs of data centers, said such ads are a tactic used by technology companies. “If you like sports, if you have kids and love America, you must love data centers, right?” he said.
In a statement, Ryan Daniels, a spokesman for Meta, did not comment on their ads, but said the company bears the full cost of its data centers’ energy use.
Amazon declined to comment. In a statement, Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition, said Virginia Connects helped “inform communities and policymakers about the data center industry,” but did not address the advertising campaign.
Meta operates 26 data centers in the United States and has announced plans to spend $600 billion building new data centers in the coming years. Last year, the company also unveiled two political action committees to support candidates supporting AI in the midterm elections. (Meta said its ad campaign spending was separate from PACs.)
Meta has highlighted how data centers can bring jobs and tax revenue to places in need of economic development. According to job postings obtained by the New York Times, the company and other tech giants have hired “community affairs” staff to build local trust.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said data centers became an issue on Capitol Hill early last year when voters began complaining en masse about rising electric bills and blaming data centers. That has made AI infrastructure part of the larger affordability debate, along with things like the cost of eggs, he said.
This month, Mr. Van Hollen introduced a bill to regulate energy consumption in data centers. The measure has support from other Democrats, but the issue will be bipartisan, he said. President Trump has recently made several statements regarding data centers and energy costs.
“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ country in the world and number one in AI. Data centers are key to this boom, keeping Americans FREE and SAFE, but the big tech companies that build them must ‘stand up for themselves,'” Trump wrote on social media on Jan. 12.
Diane Papan, a Democratic representative in California, said she saw Meta’s ads last year while working in Sacramento.
In April, she introduced a bill that would require tech companies to publicly disclose data center water usage. Gov. Gavin Newsom, another Democrat, vetoed it in October. In an interview, Ms. Papan said she was disappointed with how much the tech industry opposed the bill and that Meta and other tech companies “were not at the forefront of working with us.”
“What worries me a lot about this advertising campaign is that communities will get involved in this industry and then in 10 years they’ll say, ‘What have we done to ourselves?'” Ms Papan said.
Meta built its first data center in Altoona in 2013 and has expanded it from a building there to a 3 million-square-foot complex, said Chad Quick, Altoona’s economic development director.
Mr. Quick, who describes Meta’s relationship with Altoona as “mutually beneficial,” said a Los Angeles film crew spent a week filming scenes in the city last year. After the ad aired, people from other cities called and asked if they should also welcome new data centers, he said.
His reaction was positive. “Our experience has not been the experience that some communities have had,” Mr. Quick said.