Meta Is Quietly Replacing Data Center Technicians With Robots

3. Meta Is Quietly Replacing Data Center Technicians With Robots

Meta is testing robots from Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB inside its data centers on tasks previously handled by human technicians, according to current and former workers cited by Ars Technica. The trials include a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm evaluating power cycling on servers, a separate robot swapping networking cables, and a finger-like device that presses power buttons on Mac Minis when remotely prompted. One data center worker estimates a successful cable-swap bot could replace up to 80 percent of some workers' daily workloads. Meta declined to comment on the specific trials, though senior robotics manager Eric Xu publicly stated last year that putting robots in data centers is a "long-term goal."

This is not warehouse automation. Meta is targeting skilled technicians who manage live infrastructure, and that changes the competitive math for every hyperscaler watching labor costs against soaring AI infrastructure spend. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all face the same constraint: data centers are expanding fastest in regions where qualified technicians are scarcest. If Meta proves that commodity robotic arms from Kinova or ABB can handle cable management and power cycling reliably, it hands the entire industry a template for cutting the skilled-labor bottleneck without waiting for humanoid robots to mature. Startups currently selling server-assembly robots, including those working with Analog Devices on what the company calls "physical intelligence," now have a hyperscaler-validated use case to sell against.

The harder question is timeline. Earlier industry trials failed badly enough that robots were crushing servers on simple tasks. Meta's current experiments are narrow and unproven at scale. But the trajectory is clear: cheaper hardware plus more capable AI models is closing the gap that kept robots out of data centers for years. Watch for Meta to quietly expand vendor trials or file infrastructure-robotics patents in the next two quarters. Any public acknowledgment of production deployment would signal the industry has crossed a threshold, not just run a lab experiment.

Source: Inside Meta's push to put robots to work in data centers