How Facebook Can Help Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing

By Jeff Ferry

How could Facebook regain public and political support? Here’s a simple proposal: the company is investing $14 billion this year on capital spending. That’s a huge sum of money (and double its 2017 spend). The vast majority of it goes on the data centers Facebook is building in the U.S. and worldwide. And the vast majority of that money goes to the servers, storage, and networking gear crammed, floor to ceiling, into those data centers. Today, virtually all that money is going to Asian-manufactured IT equipment, simply because all that equipment is manufactured over there and almost none of it here. What if Facebook said it would spend a quarter of its data center budget on U.S.-manufactured equipment? If Facebook committed to spend one quarter of its IT budget on U.S.-made product, and was followed by other Internet giants, the U.S. might soon have some 3 million people working on manufacturing the products that make the Internet hum. [more...]