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Days after canceling a data center expansion in DenmarkMeta announced that a large number of data centers that will be built on an Alabama campus have been postponed indefinitely.
In a statement to The register (opens in new tab), the company claimed it remains committed to the US-based cloud storage project, but that it was looking at design changes.
“To best meet our needs going forward, we have decided to make a design change to part of our Huntsville data center, which will result in a temporary construction hiatus,” said a Meta spokesperson.
“We remain committed to this community, our local stakeholders and our supply chain partners,” the statement said. “We will work closely with our stakeholders to hand over this project as efficiently as possible.”
The data center campus in Huntsville, Alabama was announced in 2018, extensive (opens in new tab) in June 2021, and is expected to create 300 jobs when, or if, it opens.
Various outlets, eg The registerare currently reporting that Meta is likely moving away from projects like this to continue it relentless pursuit (opens in new tab) of AI and metaverse projects, including the consumer-facing ones Horizon worlds and the enterprise app Horizon Workrooms (opens in new tab).
This is more than likely the case, but it’s possible that Meta is getting out of the data business while it still can.
As reported by The click (opens in new tab) in March 2022, parents and guardians in Alabama filed a class action court case (opens in new tab) in January alleged that the company had “illegally harvested, trafficked and stored” images of children, violating their right to privacy.
It also reported that Facebook paid $650 million in 2020 to settle a similar lawsuit in Illinois, first filed in 2015, alleging that the company’s facial recognition software violated user privacy according to the Biometric Information Privacy Act. Act of the state.
In November 2021, Meta announced that it would discontinue the facial recognition system.
However, in February 2022, TechCrunch (opens in new tab) reported that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed another lawsuit alleging that Facebook’s use of the system violated the state’s privacy law “to grow its empire and achieve historic windfalls” , storing “millions” of biometric identifiers in uploaded photos.
While Meta previously had a knack for weeding out settlements and fines, it may want to shift its focus to AI and the metaverse if it believes sectors are less risky. meta, or at least Mark Zuckerberg (opens in new tab)could also believe it has such a confident foothold in the metaverse that it can afford to make the change.
Meta dodged The register‘s line of questioning on this matter, but the latter has previously reported that shareholders are getting nervous about the company’s reverse plans (opens in new tab).
As a result, it’s quite possible that the recent cutbacks in the data sector are both a cost-cutting and a challenging statement of intent.