Meta Acquires AI Coding Startup Conductor as President Warns Midterm Results Will Make Data Centers Harder to Build
By James Dargan · · 3 min read
Meta has acquired Conductor, an AI coding startup that lets developers build software projects by deploying multiple agents across parallel workspaces, while the company’s president has warned that Democratic gains in the midterm elections will make it significantly harder to build the data centers powering its AI ambitions.
The acquisition was first reported by Axios and confirmed by Meta, which declined to share further details. Conductor founder and CEO Charlie Holtz announced on Wednesday that the startup was joining Meta, saying the team had ambitious plans for the next interface and expected to offer customers something new by early next year. Holtz added on X that he was looking forward to working with Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, describing the lab as having the highest talent density of any AI lab.
Founded in 2024, Conductor released its core product last summer. Its agentic teams, which can run in the cloud, locally or from a phone, help software engineers work on separate parts of a project in parallel, using agents from major labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Holtz said core features will continue working as before until early next year, although Conductor’s cloud service will shut down on November 20, after which user cloud data will be deleted.
The deal forms part of Meta’s push to catch up in AI. The company released its own coding agent, Muse Code, in August, and its Muse agents have surpassed 10 million users. It has also made several AI acquisitions over the past year, including the viral agent platform Moltbook.
Speaking at the WSJ Tech conference on Wednesday, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said the midterm results would make building data centers much harder, acknowledging that the industry had not done enough to explain the benefits of these investments. She said data centers have become the visible face of AI and a target for community opposition, reflecting a broader unease about the technology itself.
Powell McCormick said Meta believes it can shift sentiment by demonstrating the value of both data centers and AI, adding that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting on humans over machines and that the technology must be democratized and made accessible in a fair and transparent way so people are not left behind.
She noted that Meta has been building data centers for 20 years and now operates them in 23 states, with five, including one in Texas, planned at 1 gigawatt or more. Successful projects, she explained, involve Meta paying for its own electricity, directing tax surpluses to teachers and first responders, hiring local workers and securing bipartisan backing. She expects future projects to face greater scrutiny over whether residents actually want them.
Meta is counting on Muse growing from 10 million users to a business serving billions. Even if that does not happen, Powell McCormick said the company receives daily requests to lease its compute, giving it a path to monetizing its infrastructure one way or another.
