Loud hums, pollution, and electricity costs may be the price to pay for having a data center nearby.
According to the president, though, not having one might be worse.
‘If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.’
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Monday morning to address the growing resistance to putting massive buildings filled with computer processors in American towns and cities.
Some polls, like Politico’s from January, have shown that data centers struggle to garner majority appeal to voters on either side of the aisle.
While just 45% of Trump voters supported the idea of a data center three miles from their home in that survey, the president had a more hard-line approach to the issue.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump posted as a “truth.”
He further explained that if communities want to be “successful and rich,” with lower taxes and more jobs, they should “let Data Reign.”
The president then warned that not accepting data centers would only result in foreign prosperity.
“The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!” Trump concluded.
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Later on Monday, Vice President JD Vance was asked about Trump’s remarks about how “Americans should get on board” with wanting more data centers.
“What the president said about data centers is they’re an important part of the AI economy,” Vance replied.
“But when people build them, they have to build the power plants along with the data centers. I think probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utilities and higher electricity for the people on the ground,” Vance continued.
Vance was referring to the president’s demand from February that tech companies provide whatever power their campuses or data centers require.
“They can build their own power plants as part of their factory so that no one’s prices will go up, and in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially down,” the president stated at the time. “This is a unique strategy never used in this country before.”
The pledge was almost immediately agreed to by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI.
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“If you build a data center, you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out,” Vance added on Monday. “And if that is happening, I don’t think the data centers are that controversial. It’s when the utility bills get so much higher, that’s when it’s a real problem.”
People surveyed back in January said they saw new job opportunities as the main benefit of having a nearby data center at 37%. At the same time, 29% said rising electricity costs were the primary drawback.
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Donald trump, Jd vance, Data centers, China, Tech
