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 regress 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 Truth Social post Monday. The president’s statement comes as such artificial intelligence centers remain a key issue ahead of the November midterms, one that has drawn broad opposition from many 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!”

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 a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings institution 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 August 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 projected.

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.

The president received a range of negative responses to his social media 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 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.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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.