Davos, Switzerland: Axios House

Of all the strategic moves in the tech world, Meta’s appointment of Dina Powell McCormack as President and Vice Chairman is one of the most telling. From a technologist’s perspective, her session at Davos felt less like a product roadmap and more like the unveiling of a new, and arguably more critical, layer of the company’s operating system: the geopolitical and infrastructural stack. When her daughters told her she needed to trade her “black banker suits” for “cool jeans and t-shirts” to fit in at Menlo Park, it was more than a cute anecdote. It was a perfect metaphor for the immense cultural and strategic bridge Meta is asking her to build. We in tech are accustomed to leaders who rise through engineering, product, or design.

Powell McCormack’s resume reads like a syllabus for global power: Goldman Sachs, the White House, sovereign wealth funds. Her appointment signals that Meta understands its future isn’t just about building the next killer app; it’s about navigating the complex, messy, and often hostile world in which that app must exist. Her core message was that “AI is a group sport.” This isn’t the typical Silicon Valley rhetoric of a lone genius in a garage. This is the language of infrastructure, diplomacy, and massive capital allocation. She spoke of the summit in Pittsburgh, where energy CEOs, labor union leaders representing electricians and welders, and tech executives gathered. The takeaway? Building the future of AI isn’t just about writing code; it’s about securing energy grids, training a new workforce, and managing massive physical footprints. As she noted, this new phase of compute will require half a million new electricians in the US alone. This is where her value becomes crystal clear. Meta is no longer just a software company. It has become a global infrastructure player, and its biggest challenges are no longer purely technical.

The Geopolitical Arena: Powell McCormack spoke of the “intrastate fighting” for data center investments, with states like Arkansas and Texas competing fiercely for a piece of the AI pie. This is the game she knows how to play. The AI arms race between the US and China isn’t fought with algorithms alone, but with supply chains, regulatory frameworks, and diplomatic influence. Having a leader who can call any CEO or sovereign is no longer a luxury; it’s a strategic necessity.

The Regulatory Gauntlet: For years, Meta has been on the defensive, reacting to regulatory pressure from Washington to Brussels. Powell McCormack’s presence shifts the company into a proactive stance. She speaks the language of policymakers because she has been one. Her role is to ensure Meta isn’t just subject to the rules of the game but has a hand in writing them, particularly as the world grapples with how to govern a technology poised for a “transformation in humanity.”

The Capital-Intensive Future: Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of “Meta Compute” to manage the “many hundreds of billions of dollars” required for their AI ambitions is a move straight out of the investment banking playbook. This isn’t venture capital; this is global infrastructure finance. Powell McCormack’s experience at Goldman Sachs, overseeing massive economic development programs like 10,000 Women, gives her the credibility and expertise to guide these colossal investments, ensuring they are deployed not just for maximum return, but with the community and governmental buy-in required for long-term success.

For the technologist watching, the message is profound. The era of “move fast and break things” is definitively over for the giants of the industry. The new mantra is “build carefully and negotiate everything.” Meta’s future success depends less on the elegance of its next language model and more on its ability to secure the land, power, water, and political goodwill to run it. Dina Powell McCormack isn’t at Meta to code. She’s there to clear the path. She is the human API between Meta’s technical ambitions and the world’s political and economic realities. Her challenge, and Meta’s, is to prove that a company born from the disruptive, hoodie-clad culture of Silicon Valley can mature into a responsible, suit-wearing steward of global infrastructure, without losing the innovative spark that made it powerful in the first place.


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