Technicians who do that work by hand no longer feel safe from automation, one of them says. The trials run while Meta's capital spending more than doubles and its data center teams absorb job cuts.

Meta is testing robots inside its data centers, an effort Wired reports has not surfaced publicly before. One trial puts a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm on power cycling — cutting off electricity to servers. A second robot is being tested on swapping network cables. Cruder automation is already quietly in service at some facilities: a device resembling a finger that presses the power button on a Mac Mini or similar unit to restart it when a human prompts it remotely.

One Meta data center worker estimated that a machine able to reliably swap cables could take over as much as 80% of what some staff do — his own figure rather than anything Meta has projected, and he said the robots still cannot work as fast as people. "We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore," he told Wired.

Kinova, ABB and Watney Robotics supplied the hardware; the first two declined to comment, Watney did not answer, and Meta said nothing about the trials.

Meta did speak about hiring. Francis Brennan, a company spokesperson, said Meta is investing heavily in training and hiring: "we need more workers, not fewer." Meta began shedding roughly 8,000 jobs in May 2026, about a tenth of its staff and data center teams among them, alongside a projection of $125 billion to $145 billion in capital spending for the year, more than twice the previous year's outlay.

Meta is also building AI software that two employees expect will let it hire less-skilled and lower-paid staff. "They no longer want people who can think independently, come up with creative solutions, or perform complex troubleshooting," one data center worker told Wired. "They want 'smart hands,' people who are just capable enough to follow AI instructions and not mess anything up."

People are still needed to supervise the machines and to handle the difficult repairs, and Meta has acknowledged internally that robots cannot manage some work — among it the intense cabling required to run an Nvidia GB300 supercomputer. "There's been a lot of pilots and demos, but no provable working solution," said Helen Oleynikova, chief executive of Exclaim Robotics.

"Things have been designed for human hands forever to make everything a five-minute repair," a former Meta employee said.