Trump defends AI data center buildout amid pushback

Donald Trump used a Sunday radio interview to side with AI data center builders at a moment when the projects are drawing louder pushback. The conversation was hosted by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, and was taped on Wednesday. It touched on more than data centers, but that was the part that landed hardest.

Trump argued that local and state governments are making a mistake when they block these projects. In his view, communities that turn them away are passing up jobs and “tremendous tax revenue” for towns and cities. That pitch is getting louder just as the projects themselves are getting heavier scrutiny for their effects on the grid, power prices and the environment.

And the jobs story is more complicated than the sales pitch. Data centers can mean a burst of construction work, but far fewer permanent positions after the concrete dries. OpenAI Group PBC’s planned Ohio campus is expected to generate 35,000 construction jobs over six years, then settle into about 2,500 long-term staffers once it is running.

Trump also backed AI companies that are building their own power supplies. He said they are putting up “their own power plants,” and he praised them in his own way. That matters because regulators are already easing some of the pressure: in July, the Environmental Protection Agency exempted data center power plants from parts of the Acid Rain Program, saying the move would give companies more flexibility in where and how quickly they build.

The money behind these buildouts is getting huge. OpenAI’s Ohio site will rely on a dedicated power plant expected to cost $33 billion, plus another $4 billion for transmission lines and related infrastructure. Meta Platforms has also expanded its plan for the Hyperion cluster, raising the number of power plants from three to 10 for a Louisiana campus expected to host 10 gigawatts of computing equipment. That is not a side project. It is a new industrial class with its own politics.

Trump’s comments landed just hours after Texas governor Greg Abbott blasted AI data center operators and said they had invited the backlash themselves. Abbott had already ordered a pause on new projects in the state a few weeks earlier, citing grid reliability concerns. New York has since become the first state to impose a construction moratorium, and Pennsylvania has added new environmental requirements of its own.