President Donald Trump says he isn't certain he would desire a data center in his backyard.
"I would akin to have data centers," Trump told Time Magazine as part of a shield narrative discussion published on Thursday. "It doesn't average I desire them correct next to my house, but certainly I akin them in my county."
Trump has often defended the benefits of data centers and the AI industry additional broadly, as polling shows general community skepticism. Republican governors have additionally begun to rein in incentives for data centers.
Communities that don't greeted data centers, Trump said, are additionally passing up on possibly lucrative tax revenue. As he has before, the chairman portrayed communities that oppose data center betterment as incorrect and impoverished.
"If you desire to be poor, you desire to have no money, if you don't desire to have a job, and if you desire to live in a crime-infested area, squalor, all the things that go alongside alongside it, you should not have a data center," he said.
Amid the expanding backlash against data centers, several AI and tech leaders have begun considering another ways to provision the compute they need to train and afterward run cutting-edge AI models. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is following orbital data centers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested data centers are better suited for deserts.
As he welcomed AI executives to the White House on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that data centers would rotate into "very popular" as residents see what their collaboration volition bring to their communities.
"They're going to create the community happy," Trump said. "That power be supplying oil and gas. It power be supplying education. It may be assisting teachers alongside financially, assisting group alongside financially."
Trump described how, in several cases, a data center can be "right next to a guy's house," a actuality several residents in Loudoun County, Virginia, face.
Loudoun County, residence to the famed "Data Center Alley," formerly allowed many data centers to be built by right, including several near residential neighborhoods. In 2025, district supervisors ended by-right approvals for new data centers. New proposals must now go through a assessment procedure that includes community hearings, among another steps.
Trump's anticipation for a data center in his district is additionally complicated.
Last week, the Palm Beach County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on the building of large-scale data centers. Before the vote, the commissioners rejected a projected scheme for a hyperscale data center, WPTV reported.
A smaller data center scheme for the site, which was earlier approved, is expected to proceed.
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Brent Griffiths is a elder newsman at Business Insider who covers AI and tech.Previously, he worked at the Washington Post as a investigator on Power Up and the Finance 202. He started his occupation at Politico anywhere he worked on the web manufacturing squad and covered breaking news. His enthusiasm for covering government has lone grown since he cut his teeth covering the presidential run as a pupil journalist. He's additionally contributed to the Almanac of American Politics.
