Trump Warns Communities Opposing Data Centers Will Be "Backwards and Poor"

United States President Donald Trump has publicly supported the expansion of data centers, warning that communities rejecting them will end up backwards and poor.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump stated, "If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign." He added that "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement." Trump's intervention comes amid growing opposition across the country to resource-intensive server farms.

A longtime Texas Republican voter, Tom Weeks, 66, reacted angrily to Trump's comments, calling them bulls--t rhetoric and insulting as hell on CNN. Weeks, who lives in Granbury, Texas, has pledged to vote for Democrats in the midterms over data center concerns. A UT/TPPP poll found that 57 percent of Texas voters either strongly or somewhat oppose construction of the centers in their community.

The US is currently building hundreds of data centers, with one estimate pointing to more than 3,000 operating facilities over the next decade. Major developers include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, QTS, Digital Realty, Equinix, and CyrusOne. Training and operating frontier AI models requires enormous computing capacity, making data centers power-intensive industrial plants. According to a December 2024 report from Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), a typical 250,000-square-foot data center project employs roughly 50 full-time workers, with about half being contractors.

Brookings reported that a county adds roughly 2,000 to 4,000 additional private-sector jobs about six years after its first large data center opens. Greg Wright, an economist at University of California Merced and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings institution, stated that many of those jobs are filled by outside contractors rather than local workers.

States have offered data centers large targeted tax breaks even as local job gains remain modest, according to an August academic paper co-authored by Wright.