Trump says data center opponents face ‘poverty, crime and squalor’

President Trump took aim at data center opponents again Friday, suggesting they want to “go through poverty, crime and squalor.”

It marks the second time this week that Trump has gone after critics of AI infrastructure, which has become increasingly unpopular among Americans in recent months.

“If you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you’re going to want a data center,” Trump said after an unrelated signing in the Oval Office.

“If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don’t approve data centers,” he continued. “You know, you have your choice. So I’m all for people approving them or not.”

The president similarly suggested in a Truth Social post on Monday 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.”

He has long embraced the push to build more data centers across the country, an endeavor that tech companies argue is necessary to support AI development.

But Americans have grown wary of such projects over concerns they could result in higher electricity costs, strain water resources and produce noise or air pollution.

While data centers have brought in greater tax revenue for some communities, numerous jurisdictions used tax breaks to attract the investments. States including Ohio and Illinois have paused such tax incentive programs in recent months, while others have moved even more aggressively, with New York instituting the nation’s first statewide freeze on new “hyperscale” data centers.

Trump’s comments come as Democrats and Republicans alike have sought to distance themselves from the server warehouses powering the AI boom, which are increasingly becoming a central issue in the midterm elections.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), who once touted new Amazon data centers in the Keystone State, announced new restrictions on development last month, as he faced attacks on the issue from his Republican opponent.

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, has called for a one-year moratorium on new data center projects, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) paused data center construction pending state audits.