Meta is piloting robots from three vendors, Watney Robotics, Kinova and ABB, to handle physical maintenance tasks inside its data centers, including swapping network cables, power-cycling servers, reseating components and inspecting equipment, according to an August 31, 2026 report from WIRED based on current and former employees familiar with the trials.
What the Robots Are Doing
At Meta’s Altoona, Iowa campus, a pair of dual-armed Watney robots has been tested on cabling work since June 2025, supervised by human operators and still slower than a person, per the report. At the Prometheus campus in New Albany, Ohio, four-wheel ABB robots equipped with a scissor-lift riser and a six-axis arm are being used to reseat hardware components, and Meta is separately evaluating a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm for power-cycling servers. Meta has also deployed simpler robots that remotely restart devices by physically pressing power buttons. Kinova and ABB declined to comment to WIRED, and Watney did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.
Why It Matters
One Meta data-center worker told WIRED that a working cable-swapping system could eventually take on as much as 80% of some technicians’ current workload, though that figure is an employee estimate rather than a company-published target, and the robots still struggle with dense cabling, tight corners and tasks that require sustained autonomy. As AI-driven data center buildouts accelerate, the trials point to facility operations and physical security converging with the same automation trends reshaping server hardware itself.
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