Photo: Guillaume Paumier / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and has run it ever since. The company renamed itself Meta in 2021.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which together reach billions of people. Zuckerberg has bet heavily on virtual reality and, more recently, artificial intelligence, spending tens of billions on chips and data centers.
One of those data centers is in Altoona, just east of Des Moines. Facebook announced it in 2013, and the campus has grown several times since. It runs on wind power under agreements with MidAmerican Energy.
For many in Wright County, Facebook is still the main place to find out about a school cancellation, a church supper or a lost dog.
Kim Sanders writes for Clarion News Online.