Key points
- Wired reported August 28 that Meta (META) is testing robots to plug in cables, power cycle servers, and reseat parts at data centers in Iowa and Ohio.
- One worker estimates a cable-swapping bot could replace up to 80% of some workloads if it succeeds.
- Meta declined to comment on the tests. A spokesperson said the company needs "more workers, not fewer."
Meta Platforms is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and take on other physical tasks inside its data centers, Wired reported on Friday, citing several current and former workers. The projects hadn't been reported before.
The hardware comes from at least three vendors, according to Wired's sources: Kinova, a Canadian robotic-arm maker, the Swiss automation group ABB, and Watney Robotics, a San Francisco startup that began as a laundry-folding demo in 2023 and pivoted to data centers early last year. In one experiment, Meta is evaluating a Kinova Gen3 arm for power cycling servers. A separate robot is being tested on swapping networking cables. One Meta data center worker told Wired that if the cable bot works, it could replace up to 80% of some people's workloads. "It's coming for us all, unfortunately," the worker said.
Meta declined to comment on the testing. Spokesperson Francis Brennan told Wired the company is investing heavily in hiring and training data center workers, and that America's infrastructure boom means it needs "more workers, not fewer." Meta launched a free trades-training program this year with guaranteed jobs in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas, and it has committed $1 billion to its data center host towns, which we covered in August alongside its $145 billion capex budget.
Eric Xu, Meta's senior manager for robotics, said at a conference last year that putting robots in data centers is a long-term goal, and that they could speed up incident response and handle preventative maintenance.
The testing is happening at Meta's oldest and newest campuses, per Wired. Since June 2025, a pair of dual-armed Watney robots has been working on cabling at Altoona, Iowa, Meta's largest campus and its usual prototyping site. The robots are supervised by humans and slower than people so far. In New Albany, Ohio, at the new Prometheus campus, four-wheel ABB robots with scissor-lift risers and six-axis arms are reseating parts. Meta has also quietly deployed a much simpler machine at some sites: a finger-like device that presses a power button on a Mac Mini or similar hardware when a human triggers it remotely.
Wired's sources said Meta's barcode-reading inventory bot, now also used for failure inspections, sees only in grayscale, so it can't tell a green status light from a red one, and humans still have to check some breakdowns. Workers have complained about battery-recharge downtime, and Meta has acknowledged internally that the robots can't handle the dense cabling an Nvidia GB300 system requires.
Rivals are running similar experiments. Microsoft (MSFT) research managing director Ashley Llorens told Wired the company is looking into robots for tasks like replacing a faulty server rack, and Google and Amazon have made their own data center robotics investments. Paul Golding, who runs physical-intelligence work at Analog Devices (ADI), said customers increasingly want data centers run by humanoid robots because they can operate in the dark and at higher temperatures.
In Friday afternoon trading, META was up about 0.9% at $576. Wired noted Meta's Altoona campus still carries a property tax break worth tens of millions of dollars a year, justified partly by jobs. Worker group chats there have turned demoralized, one source said, and some employees believe Meta now wants "smart hands" who follow AI instructions rather than technicians who troubleshoot on their own.
