US President Donald Trump has claimed that American communities opposing data centre development risk economic decline, casting the facilities as essential to national prosperity.
"The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want Data Centres is if they want to end up being backwards and poor," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Monday.
He argued that embracing the facilities would instead deliver "far lower taxes and jobs all over the place," urging the country to "let Data Reign."
Trump said other locations remain eager to host the facilities if US communities reject them, adding that "there are plenty of other places that want them."
He warned that rejecting the industry could have lasting consequences, saying "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," he added.
Public resistance to data centre construction has been growing across the US, according to polling data, owing to rising concerns over increased residential electricity bills, energy and water demands placed on local utilities, noise pollution, and a lack of proportional long-term local job creation.
A University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released this month found 61 percent of US adults were against new data centers in their area, up from 49 percent in the spring, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents opposed.
Midterm elections
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, demand has surged for massive data centres that consume vast tracts of land and enormous amounts of electricity, fueling growing unease in both urban and rural America.
The snowballing opposition to data centres in communities across the country has transformed the midterm election landscape and. thrown a wrench into the plans of the world's richest companies.
It's a dramatic shift from two years ago, when few people had even heard of a data centre.
But the late 2022 debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT ignited worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products that typically require large amounts of computing power to train and operate.
Now, Oracle, Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft expect to plunge more than $700 billion into data centers in the US this year alone.
Sprawling into rural America Tech giants and developers need huge tracts of land to accommodate mammoth computing warehouses, so they've been exploring deeper into rural America.
The push has united conservative ranching and farming communities with left-leaning environmental advocacy groups, who share a combined concern about drought-stricken waterways, pollution in food-growing areas and shrinking farmland.
The Republican president is a leading champion for the data centres, seeing it as critical to winning the artificial intelligence race against China.
Trump’s administration is pushing to help tech giants build and connect data centres to power plants and high-voltage power lines and convert Cold War-era uranium enrichment plants into data centre and power plant complexes.
