Trump Trumpets Data Centers as GOP Grows Wary Ahead of Midterms

President Donald Trump moved this week to shore up political support for one of the most unpopular pillars of his economic agenda, warning on Truth Social that communities resisting new data centers risk being left “backwards and poor.”

In a Monday morning post, Trump wrote that “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,” adding that towns embracing the facilities would see “far lower taxes and jobs all over the place.” He capped the message with a rallying cry — “let Data Reign” — and warned that if the U.S. turned the projects away, “China could not be happier.”

The post may not have accurately read the room. Data centers, once an uncontroversial piece of digital infrastructure, have become a flashpoint in American politics as the AI boom drives a nationwide building spree. A report from Data Center Watch found that at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition in the first three months of 2026 alone — matching the total for all of 2025 — as the number of active opposition groups more than doubled, to 833, across 49 states. Separate research from Sightline Climate estimated that 30 to 50 percent of large data centers scheduled to come online this year could face delays, citing power constraints, equipment shortages and community pushback alongside surging demand. National polling has tracked a similar shift: some surveys have put opposition to new data centers in one’s own neighborhood as high as 70 percent.

That backlash has scrambled the politics around a technology the White House has staked much of its economic message on. The rift is now visible inside Trump’s own party: while the president remains a vocal booster of the buildout, a growing number of Republican candidates and officials — facing constituents angry over rising utility bills, water use and noise — have called for tighter local controls or outright moratoriums. Vice President JD Vance, appearing before reporters the same day, offered a more qualified defense, saying data centers were “an important part of the AI economy” but that companies building them “should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out.” He argued that most of the public anger was concentrated in areas where new facilities were driving up electricity costs.

Trump’s insistence on backing the industry regardless of the political cost reflects the outsized role data center construction now plays in the broader economy. Harvard economist Jason Furman calculated that spending on information-processing equipment and software — a category dominated by AI infrastructure — made up just 4 percent of U.S. GDP but accounted for 92 percent of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Strip that spending out, Furman found, and annualized growth over the period would have been close to zero.

That dependence is precisely what has drawn warnings from financial regulators. In a letter to G20 finance ministers ahead of their meeting in North Carolina this week, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey — writing in his capacity as chair of the international Financial Stability Board — cautioned that markets remain “vulnerable to a potentially disorderly correction that could spread across borders.” Bailey pointed specifically to heavy borrowing concentrated among a small number of AI companies and to the growing web of “cross-investment” between AI firms and the cloud providers that supply them with computing power, warning that this combination “could amplify a future market correction.” Nvidia, whose market value has topped $5 trillion, has become a central node in that web: beyond its previously announced plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and up to $105 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio, the chipmaker has separately been in talks to put as much as $30 billion more into OpenAI, according to people familiar with the discussions.

For the administration, that arithmetic — a boom that is propping up growth but increasingly reliant on debt-fueled investment in a handful of firms — helps explain why Trump is willing to absorb political damage two months before the midterms rather than side with data center opponents. Critics of that stance counter that the industry’s economic weight is exactly why regulators and residents are right to scrutinize it now, before a potential slowdown in AI investment ripples through the wider economy. The dispute, for now, remains unresolved: Trump has signaled no willingness to temper his support.

Data from the Gartner Market Guide for data center colocation, the WGI Tech Trends Report, and CBRE’s Data Center and Insights were used in this article.

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Wayne Creed

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