Hard Fork · Friday, October 2, 2026
A New York Times report details how Meta is leveraging its AI data center construction to claim substantial tax credits for research and development. Critics question whether this constitutes genuine experimental research, given the scale of investment and the company's potential benefits, while taxpayers fund these infrastructure projects without direct upside.
“Basically, META is building, we know, is building all these data centers to help power Muse and the various other, Ren, Haley, Brett, all the various MISA, all of our cute little friends. And they're claiming on their taxes a very specific tax credit for research, that this is for sort of like scientific research, experimental scientific research purposes.”
“The taxpayers, we have none of the upside of these investments, right? I thought back to Trump talking about, oh, maybe we should give people stakes in the AI companies. And in this case, it's like you have – all of us taxpayers funding billions and billions of dollars of the data centers. But we don't seem to be you know, benefiting from it.”