Meta is quietly building an army of machines to work inside its data centers, and the people who currently keep those facilities humming are not thrilled about it. According to current and former workers, the company is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and power-cycle equipment — the kind of hands-on tasks that were, until recently, considered safely human territory.
The hardware comes from a spread of vendors: Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB. In one experiment, Meta is evaluating whether a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm can handle power cycling, cutting electricity to servers on command. A separate robot is being trialed to swap networking cables. One worker estimates that, if it lands, the bot could take over up to 80 percent of some people’s workloads. “We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” the worker says.
Not everything is high-concept. At some facilities Meta has adopted a delightfully low-tech gadget that looks like a finger — or a pointy stick — designed to press the power button on a Mac Mini or similar device to reboot it when a human triggers it remotely.
Meta’s largest campus is in Altoona, Iowa, where workers have voiced concerns about the shift toward automation.
Publicly, Meta insists it needs more workers, not fewer, pointing to a training and hiring program. But at a conference last year, Meta robotics manager Eric Xu was blunt about the endgame: the company’s “long-term goals” are to put robots in data centers. “We have to start,” he said, “otherwise we don’t have a chance to do this.”
