Technology

Trump Tells Data Center Builders To Pay Neighbors If They Want The Projects Welcomed

Official White House Photo by Patrick B. Ruddy

President Donald Trump told data center builders early Wednesday to pay the communities around their projects if they want local support.

Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, that if companies want their data centers to be popular, they should “pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend.’” He said that new large data centers “are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid,” and that “there could be a substantial decrease” in electricity prices.

“I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck,” the president added in the post. “MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!!”

Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and the Data Center Coalition — a trade group for data center companies — each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment. The White House and Meta each did not immediately provide comments on the record.

The post comes about two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that 72 percent of Americans oppose building a new data center where they live, including 58 percent of Republicans.

The poll found opposition to a nearby data center was highest in rural areas, at 78 percent. Thirty percent of Americans said they support building more data centers in the country, a share that rose to 53 percent among MAGA Republicans.

Trump floated a data center “dividend” Sept. 29, the day he hosted technology executives at the White House, telling reporters that “a dividend sounds right,” Newsweek reported.

“Data centers are bringing in a tremendous amount of money into the community, and the people now are going to benefit directly,” he said at the time, according to the outlet.

A Kansas City, Missouri-based developer has already offered Pennsylvania residents the kind of payment Trump is talking about. NorthPoint Development said in a June 24 release that each eligible Hazle Township household would get a $10,000 grant once the first building of Project Hazelnut, its planned data center campus there, receives its certificate of occupancy, which the company expects in late 2027.

The grants are part of a $165 million package that also includes $7 million a year for the township over 15 years, which the company said could pay for a township police force and lower trash fees. NorthPoint also said that the campus would create more than 900 permanent jobs. NorthPoint did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Some neighbors have not been won over.

“I call it a bribe,” Ed Negra, a retiree who lives in a resort community above the cleared site, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). Hazle Township residents have won a court order halting construction and a township moratorium, the outlet reported.

Not every offer has held up. Frederick County, Maryland, announced Sept. 1 a proposed agreement with Catellus, the developer of a data center campus there, that would have provided $110 million in benefits for residents, according to a county announcement. The package included $30 million to renovate an elementary school, $40 million toward a community center and $1 million so the local volunteer fire company could buy an engine. County Executive Jessica Fitzwater rejected the agreement Sept. 14 amid public outcry and extended the county’s moratorium on data center applications to July 1, 2027, WYPR reported.

The White House has also pushed tech companies to pay for the power their data centers use. A July 23 White House release said that more than 200 utilities, states, cooperatives and data center developers had newly joined the administration’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, and that the pledge now covers 80 percent of all power delivered to U.S. homes and businesses.

The pledge commits large data center operators to pay for the power and the grid work their projects need, so these costs are not passed on to ratepayers, according to the release. It said that Meta is covering the whole cost of connecting its data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, under a deal with the utility Entergy, and that the developer Crusoe is powering its 900-megawatt campus in Abilene, Texas, entirely with its own natural gas generators and batteries on site.

“If the data center is tied into the grid, even if it is just for emergency power, it could drive up the grid portion of household expenses,” Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, said in a statement to the DCNF. He added that a data center competing with the local utility for fuel “could negatively impact the cost of power by creating extra demand for limited fuel supplies.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an Aug. 10 letter on the company’s website that teachers in Richland Parish “received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from our investment.” He wrote that Meta is launching a fund “to support each community we work in directly.”

The poll of 2,545 U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 9-13 using the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, and its overall margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points. Each data center question was asked of a random half of the sample, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.