Meta just elevated board member Dina Powell McCormick to President and Vice Chairman, a move that turns her recent resignation from the board into a calculated transition rather than an exit. The Goldman Sachs veteran and former Trump deputy national-security adviser will now run day-to-day operations, signaling that Meta is preparing for capital-intensive, globally sensitive projects that require both diplomatic reach and balance-sheet creativity.
From Situation Room to Server Room
Powell McCormick’s résumé spans 16 years at Goldman Sachs, senior State Department posts under George W. Bush, and a seat on Trump’s National Security Council. She has brokered sovereign-debt restructurings, negotiated Middle-East security frameworks, and maintained relationships across Wall Street, the Pentagon, and foreign ministries. That network is valuable to a company that must convince regulators in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing that its AI models and metaverse infrastructure will not roil currencies, elections, or teen mental health.
Moving her from the boardroom into the C-suite gives Meta real-time geopolitical risk management rather than after-the-fact oversight. With a projected $65 billion in capital expenditures for AI hardware, subsea cables, and geothermal data centers, every customs delay or sanctions update can erase nine-figure quarters. Powell McCormick has spent two decades converting such frictions into deal flow, and she is expected to replicate the Goldman playbook: turn regulatory headaches into preferred-partner status, then price the premium into the term sheet.
Goldman-Style Capital Formation Meets Meta-Scale Compute
An internal memo says Powell McCormick will “partner directly with our infrastructure and compute teams to ensure successful execution of multi-billion-dollar investments.” Translated: find inventive financing for the largest hardware build-out in Meta’s history without wrecking the balance sheet. She has already raised more than $50 billion for bank recapitalizations after the financial crisis and for Gulf energy megaprojects, syndicating risk across sovereign wealth funds, pension giants, and strategic suppliers.
Expect new “strategic capital partnerships,” Meta’s term for off-balance-sheet vehicles where outside investors fund GPUs, land, and power in exchange for long-term cloud credits or revenue shares. The twist is folding foreign-policy incentives into the mix. If an EU development bank can cover 20 percent of a European AI campus in return for local job-creation optics, the effective capital cost drops while regulators tweet praise.
Trump World’s Second Act at Meta
Powell McCormick is the second Trump administration alum to join Meta in weeks; Curtis Joseph Mahoney, former Treasury sanctions counsel, recently became chief legal officer. Together, they provide insight into how national-security decisions are shaped before they are announced. When CFIUS reviews a Singapore AI lab or the Commerce Department floats new GPU export controls, it helps to have people who once sat inside those rooms.
The hires also give Meta bipartisan armor on Capitol Hill. Democrats criticize the company on privacy and misinformation; Republicans claim anti-conservative bias. Powell McCormick’s Republican credentials open doors on the right, while her Goldman pedigree reassures centrist Democrats that Meta remains committed to global business pragmatism. She functions as a diplomatic Rorschach test—every faction sees what it wants.
The Infrastructure Arbitrage Playbook
Meta’s 10-K shows $42.8 billion in property and equipment; 2024 capex guidance points to $65 billion. To justify that burn rate, the company must arbitrage tax codes, energy prices, and export-control loopholes. Powell McCormick spent the past decade securing power-purchase agreements at 2.3¢ per kWh in Qatar and West Texas while helping sovereigns restructure debt. Meta’s new personal-superintelligence clusters—custom silicon, liquid-cooled racks, 150 kW per cabinet—are useless if they cannot be plugged in where Treasury rules won’t treat the subsidiary as a Controlled Foreign Corporation. Her contacts among finance ministers and central-bank governors amount to a cheat sheet for parking gigawatt-scale load without triggering BEAT or GILTI penalties.
| Region | Avg Industrial Power ($/MWh) | U.S. Export-Control Risk | Meta AI Data-Campus Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texas Permian | 24.10 | None | 3 campuses live, 2 planned |
| Denmark Esbjerg | 38.50 | Low | Cable landing + 150 MW farm |
| Saudi NEOM | 18.00 | Moderate | MOU stage; Powell lead |
| Malaysia Johor | 42.00 | High (AI chokepoint) | Negotiating CFC waiver |
A 100 MW facility shifted from Johor to NEOM saves $24 million a year in energy opex and sidesteps the Bureau of Industry and Security’s AI chokepoint list that just caught Nvidia’s H20 SKUs.
Regulatory Capture, Not Evasion
Hiring two Trump alumni in a month looks like “ideological insurance” inside the Beltway and a lower cost of capital on Wall Street. The timing is surgical. The EU’s AI Act takes effect in August with trillion-parameter disclosure rules that could marginalize open-source models like Llama. The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to release another AI diffusion rule this summer that may cap data-center deployments in 40 countries. Powell McCormick helped draft the 2017 National Security Strategy that classified AI as “critical and emerging technology.” She knows which clauses are negotiable.
Meta is expected to lobby for a “trusted infrastructure” exemption that ties export licenses to domestic job creation—turning each new U.S. data center into a customs-free zone for GPUs. Engineers have modeled a “Powell scenario” that cuts foreign GPU share to 15 percent, offset by sovereign co-investment, boosting five-year NPV by $7.4 billion—roughly Snap’s market cap.
The Payoff: From Llama to Lira
Powell McCormick’s biggest contribution may be financial engineering. Meta holds $53.2 billion in cash and securities, but only $18 billion is inside the U.S. Repatriating the rest after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act triggers a 15.5 percent toll. Her workaround: issue euro-denominated convertible infrastructure bonds out of Meta Global Infrastructure B.V., wrapped by Euler Hermes for political-risk insurance. The bonds convert not into Meta equity but into dedicated AI compute credits, letting sovereign buyers such as Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala or Norway’s NBIM pre-pay for ten-year GPU capacity at a 6 percent discount.
If the structure succeeds, Meta gains a $25 billion off-balance-sheet fund for data centers without breaching leverage covenants in its 2026 and 2028 notes. Powell McCormick keeps capex off the cash-flow statement, Zuckerberg keeps scaling models, and regulators get photo-ops of “U.S. AI leadership” without noticing that GPU futures have quietly privatized a slice of monetary policy.
This is more than a revolving-door story. It is Silicon Valley’s admission that the scarcest AI resource is not compute but the diplomatic capital to move that compute across borders. By installing a former deputy NSA in the C-suite, Meta is not merely hedging against regulation; it is pricing regulation like a volatility surface. The next time Llama drops, watch the bond spreads on Meta’s infrastructure notes, not the model card—Powell McCormick already is.