Zuckerberg Has an AI Empire to Build. Meet the Adviser Who Handles the Details

(Bloomberg) -- At a Meta Platforms Inc. board retreat last December, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg asked Dina Powell McCormick to take a walk with him around his sprawling Kauai compound, known as Koolau Ranch.

Zuckerberg told Powell McCormick, a former Trump administration official and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who'd joined the board eight months prior, that the $1.7 trillion company was banking its future on artificial intelligence. To do that, Meta would need to raise a tremendous amount of outside capital. And Zuckerberg would need a right-hand adviser with the robust connections and political capital required to smooth the way with both financial institutions and governments.

"It became clear to me that she could play a bigger role in Meta's next chapter," Zuckerberg recalls. He asked her to trade the board seat for a key internal role. Zuckerberg told her it would be the most important job she'd ever have.

A well-connected power player in both Washington and on Wall Street, Powell McCormick has built relationships with a shocking breadth of people including former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink and pop star Katy Perry, and has had plenty of big jobs. But about a week after Zuckerberg's pitch, she resigned from the board. In January, she became president, vice chairman and co-leader of Meta Compute, its effort to build and monetize the infrastructure fueling the AI revolution.

Nine months in, Powell McCormick's remit extends far beyond helping to hash out deals for Meta Compute. Interviews with more than a dozen Meta insiders, outside executives and government officials and Powell McCormick herself show she's an executive trusted by Zuckerberg and his top deputies to tackle the company's thorniest problems – including countering the backlash to AI and weighing in on major legal and reputational fights, like Meta's recent settlement of up to $18 billion with state attorneys general over children's safety on Instagram and Facebook.

Powell McCormick has appeared for Meta at Davos, traveled with President Donald Trump and an entourage of Silicon Valley's most famous to China and met with King Charles III, freeing Zuckerberg to spend his time in Menlo Park with the engineers and researchers rushing to build Meta's next generation of models. While Zuckerberg, 42, is the cerebral engineering leader obsessed with improving Meta's products for the AI race, Powell McCormick, 53, has her pulse on the world outside of Silicon Valley, and can be Meta's bridge to opportunities and fixer of challenges.