Meta is quietly testing robots inside its data centers to handle the physical grunt work—plugging in cables, resetting servers, power cycling equipment—that has long been considered safe from automation. Several current and former workers told us the company is evaluating hardware from Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB, though Meta declined to comment on the specifics. One experiment involves a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm tasked with cutting power to servers. Another robot swaps networking cables, and one data center worker estimates that if it succeeds, 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 said. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”
This isn’t the flashy humanoid robot narrative that dominates headlines. Meta is taking a deliberately unglamorous approach—one robot is described as looking like a finger or a pointy stick that presses the power button on a Mac Mini when a human remotely prompts it. It’s the kind of narrow, single-purpose automation that tends to actually ship, unlike the general-purpose robot demos that generate YouTube views but never leave the lab. The company has spent years building custom server racks and networking gear; extending that same internal infrastructure focus to physical maintenance is a logical next step.
Meta’s public position is that it needs more workers, not fewer. Spokesperson Francis Brennan pointed to the massive infrastructure buildout underway and a shortage of skilled labor. But the timing is hard to ignore. Meta’s AI infrastructure spending has exploded, and data center footprints are expanding faster than the labor pool can keep up. Robots that can reset a server at 3 a.m. without a human on site start to look less like a novelty and more like a cost-control imperative.
The broader context here is that the AI boom is creating its own labor problem. Every hyperscaler is racing to build data centers, and the technicians who run them are in short supply. If Meta’s cable-swapping robot works, expect competitors to follow fast—the same way they did with custom silicon and liquid cooling. The question isn’t whether physical data center work gets automated, but how quickly and what happens to the workers who’ve been doing it.
