Trump champions data centers as Republicans turn against them
As voters in both parties grow anxious about the rapid build-out of data centers, President Donald Trump remains one of the tech industry’s most prominent champions — putting him increasingly at odds with members of his own party.
Nowhere is that divergence clearer than in Texas, where Trump travels Thursday to campaign for Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and Republican Senate candidate.
The state has courted some of the country’s biggest data center projects, but now Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) have moved to address voters’ concerns about the centers’ potential to raise power costs and disrupt neighborhoods, with Abbott pausing new projects from connecting to the state’s power grid and Paxton endorsing his approach.
Days after Abbott imposed the pause, Trump called the Texas governor’s resistance to data centers “a mistake.” The rift highlights a rare policy issue where Republicans are willing to break openly with the White House.
Trump has made accelerating data centers a signature priority, signing an executive order last year that expedites federal permitting, facilitates construction on federal land and makes qualifying projects eligible for financial incentives. He has hosted tech leaders in the Oval Office to celebrate multibillion-dollar deals for new data centers. And even as more members of his party turn against them, he repeatedly defends the rise of the tech infrastructure in public comments and interviews.
“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” Trump said last week, surrounded by leaders from the crypto industry.
“And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”
A national survey conducted Aug. 21-24 by the Economist and YouGov found that 51 percent of Americans disagree with the president’s assessment, including 41 percent of respondents who identified as conservatives.
The poll also found that 61 percent of Americans opposed construction of a data center in their community, including 47 percent of Republicans.
More than half of people who voted for Trump in the 2024 election said that a new data center in their community would increase their electricity costs — a concern supported by evidence that the facilities’ enormous power demands can raise wholesale prices and leave other customers paying for grid upgrades. [Continue reading…]