Politics

Trump Claims Opposing Data Centers Will Make Communities Poor. The Data Doesn’t Back That Up.

[Screenshot/Rumble/CBS]

President Donald Trump claimed communities rejecting data centers will become poor and progress backwards.

Communities that reject data centers risk becoming “backwards and poor,” while those that welcome them will see job creation and far lower taxes, the president said in a Monday Truth Social post. The president’s statement comes as data centers remain a key issue ahead of the November midterms, one that has drawn broad opposition from many Republican voters.

“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. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump said on Truth Social. “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,” the president added. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”

Communities that reject data centers are not all “poor” ones, however.

Localities that blocked or delayed projects tended to sit near the national median household income, according to Carbon Direct.

A typical 250,000-square-foot data center project employs roughly 50 full-time workers, and roughly half of them are contractors, according to a Dec. 2024 report from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC).

A county adds roughly 2,000 to 4,000 additional private-sector jobs about six years after its first large data center opens, according to Brookings.

“The data centers that have been built to date typically create dozens of permanent jobs,” Greg Wright, an economist at University of California, Merced and Brookings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This can be not-insignificant in a rural community, though 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 Aug. academic paper co-authored by Wright, The Local Economic Impact of Data Centers.

“The new wave of data center construction involves much larger data center campuses than we have previously seen (e.g., Meta 5GW in Louisiana), and so will create more jobs than prior projects,” Wright told the DCNF. “It is also worth mentioning that the construction phase can create hundreds or thousands of jobs over the 1-2 year construction period.”

Wright noted the scale of these projects is smaller than similar semiconductor and manufacturing projects.

Landing these data center projects means forgoing significant tax revenue, one research analyst argues.

“Data center companies extract massive tax breaks from state and local governments and even receive subsidies from the federal government,” Kasia Tarczynska, senior research analyst at Good Jobs First, told the DCNF. “These subsidies can eliminate much of a data center’s tax obligations, while everyday people pay their full share.”

Subsidies extended to establish these projects far outweigh the permanent jobs they create, and increased tax revenue “fails to materialize,” Good Jobs First argued in a Jan. 23 blog post.

Good Jobs First cited the 2024 JLARC report in addition to a 2025 University of Georgia review of Georgia’s sales-tax break, both of which found the sales-tax breaks cost the states more than the data centers returned in tax revenue.

Those subsidies drain billions from state and local budgets, which is money that could fund public services, Tarczynska argued.

“Communities have heard similar promises before from other extractive industries like petrochemical, coal, and natural gas industries that also received billions in public subsidies but too often failed to deliver, leaving communities to bear the costs,” Tarczynska told the DCNF. “We should not repeat that history with data centers.”

The president received several negative responses to his Truth post.

“Mr. President: Think about farm land and about water resources, and a man as intelligent as you will see that the absolute position you are taking is flawed,” one Truth user posted, in response to the president.

“I have to disagree with this one. AI is evil,” another Truth user posted, responding to the president. “The world will regret it in the long run. It’s already making people lazy and dumbed-down.”

Americans across party lines oppose data centers, with seven in ten Americans stating they disagreed with “the construction of a data center in your area to support artificial intelligence, or AI, technology in the U.S.,” according to a May Gallup poll.

Roughly 75 percent of the American public oppose “a data center being built near where you live,” according to Heatmap News’ Aug. 19 poll.

The White House defended the president’s economic case.

“President Trump’s bold leadership is turning data centers into engines of growth and opportunity for communities across the country that want them, all while cementing America’s dominance over China in the global AI race,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the DCNF. “By requiring data centers to pay for their own power, water, and utilities, the President has ensured the American people never foot the bill for private companies’ profits.”

Still, supporters counter that data centers strengthen the grid and support the economy.

“While some may label the construction jobs created by the data center industry as ‘temporary,’ data centers actually create stable, high-wage jobs for years,” said Dan Diorio, executive vice president of state policy and government affairs for the Data Center Coalition. The group says each project employs hundreds of construction workers and more than 1,000 at a project’s peak.

Jobs supported by the data center industry nationwide, including related jobs in other industries, climbed to 4.7 million in 2023 from 2.9 million in 2017, a Feb. 2025 PwC study for the Data Center Coalition found.

Innovation Council President Taylor Budowich echoed the president’s framing of the issue.

“President Trump is hitting on something important: modern data centers are creating jobs and wealth in communities that have been left behind by decades of outsourcing,” Budowich told the DCNF. “Nobody cares more about the forgotten men and women of America than President Trump — that’s why he’s so eager to see them get their share of the cut from the AI boom. Data centers make that happen.”

Budowich, a longtime Trump adviser, served as White House deputy chief of staff before leaving for the private sector in Sept. 2025.

Supporters also argue data centers bolster the electric grid.

“Data centers are the perfect electricity customer. They create 24/7, consistent, predictable demand,” Christopher Johnson, president of the American Energy Leadership Institute, told the DCNF.

“That is exactly what is needed for big investments in power production,” Johnson added. “Those investments will not only keep prices down, but also finance the grid and transmission infrastructure we have needed for decades.”

Trump previously said, “Electricity bills for American families will actually come down,” when he expanded the Ratepayer Protection Pledge to government leaders, developers, and power providers in July. The voluntary pledge asked tech companies to finance their own power costs.