Dina Powell McCormick’s move into one of the top jobs at Meta lands at the intersection of Big Tech, Wall Street, and Washington, and it says a lot about where Mark Zuckerberg wants to take the company over the next decade. On paper, the title alone is striking: president and vice chairman, reporting directly to Zuckerberg, with a brief that runs straight through Meta’s most consequential bet yet—its push into artificial intelligence and the massive infrastructure that will power it.​

Powell McCormick isn’t arriving as an unknown quantity inside Meta’s orbit. She joined the company’s board in April 2025 and quietly stepped down eight months later, a short stint that now looks more like a prelude to a bigger role than a brief experiment. Internally, Meta describes her as having been “deeply engaged” in its pivot toward frontier AI and what Zuckerberg likes to call “personal superintelligence,” which is shorthand for AI systems that feel less like tools and more like always‑on assistants woven into Meta’s apps. Bringing her in as president formalizes that involvement and gives Zuckerberg a seasoned power broker to help steer the company through its most capital‑intensive phase since the original Facebook growth years.​

Her résumé reads like a checklist of the skills Mega‑Cap Tech now prizes. Powell McCormick spent more than 16 years at Goldman Sachs, rising to partner, serving on the management committee, and running the firm’s sovereign business—work that meant spending years in the room with some of the world’s biggest government‑backed funds, especially in the Middle East. Before Wall Street, she logged over a decade in Republican administrations, including a stint as deputy national security adviser for strategy under Donald Trump and earlier senior roles at the State Department under George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. That combination of global finance, geopolitics, and economic development experience is precisely what you want if your next chapter is about persuading governments and sovereign funds to help bankroll tens of gigawatts worth of new data centers and energy projects.​

Meta isn’t being coy about that ambition. In a post announcing a new AI infrastructure push branded Meta Compute, Zuckerberg said the company plans to build “tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” framing infrastructure itself as a strategic advantage in the race with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. That’s an energy and capital requirement closer to a utility or an oil major than a traditional software company, which is why Powell McCormick’s remit explicitly includes partnering with “governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.” In practice, that likely means a lot of closed‑door conversations about land, power, incentives, and co‑investment at a scale most social networks never had to contemplate.​

The appointment also continues a quiet but unmistakable trend: Meta is pulling more talent from Trump‑world into its top ranks. Powell McCormick is now the second former Trump official brought in within weeks, following Curtis Joseph Mahoney, a former deputy U.S. trade representative who recently joined as Meta’s chief legal officer after a stint as a senior legal executive at Microsoft. Trump himself gave Powell McCormick a full‑caps endorsement on Truth Social, calling her “a great choice by Mark Z!!!” and praising her work in his administration, an unusually enthusiastic public blessing for a Big Tech executive at a moment when the industry is under intense scrutiny from his administration and regulators. For Meta, that network could matter as it navigates antitrust fights, content regulation, and negotiations over AI, speech, and data during Trump’s second term.​

Inside Meta, Powell McCormick steps into a power structure that already includes heavyweight operators on the infrastructure side. Zuckerberg has tapped Santosh Janardhan, who oversees Meta’s global data center fleet and networks, and Daniel Gross, who will lead long‑term capacity strategy and planning, to drive the engineering and forecasting piece of Meta Compute. Powell McCormick is the third leg of that stool: the person expected to translate those technical roadmaps into capital structures, government partnerships, and long‑horizon deals that make the numbers work. Think less about negotiating advertising partnerships and more about striking multibillion‑dollar arrangements with host countries, utilities, and investors to secure land, power, and financing for AI infrastructure that may not fully pay off for years.​

Viewed from the outside, her appointment is also a signal about how Meta sees its own identity evolving. This is no longer just the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads; it is positioning itself as a foundational infrastructure player for AI, building a physical and financial model meant to underwrite “the next decade of computing,” in Zuckerberg’s words. Hiring a president whose background is split between the Situation Room, the State Department, and Goldman’s sovereign wealth relationships suggests Meta expects its biggest challenges to be geopolitical and financial, not purely technical or product‑driven. At the same time, the choice of a well‑connected Republican insider at a moment of renewed scrutiny over Big Tech’s power will inevitably raise questions about how Meta balances or leverages its political relationships as AI systems become more central to economies and elections.​

For Powell McCormick, the role is a chance to compress her two careers—public service and high finance—into a single, highly visible portfolio at one of the most consequential companies in the world. Born in Egypt and raised in the United States, she has often framed her public‑sector work around opportunity and economic development, helping launch initiatives like Goldman’s 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses during her time at the bank. Now, those themes collide with a very different canvas: an AI arms race in which data centers, energy grids, and regulatory goodwill are as important as clever models and viral apps. Whether Meta’s big bet on AI super‑infrastructure pays off will depend on engineering breakthroughs and product execution—but also on whether its new president can convince governments, investors, and communities that they all have a stake in Meta’s next act.