Donald Trump has told Americans campaigning against new data centres that their protests are a gift to Beijing, escalating a fight that has travelled from small-town council meetings to the centre of the November midterm campaign. In a Truth Social post on Monday, the US president said communities that reject the vast computing warehouses behind the artificial intelligence boom must want to end up “backwards and poor”, and called on the country to “let Data Reign”.The post went further than his usual pitch about jobs and tax revenue. Trump warned that Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if the projects are killed off, and said China “could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement”. He has been building to this line for weeks. Trump used the same China argument last week in an interview with Michael Cohen, his former fixer, insisting the US led in AI “by a lot”. Xi Jinping is due at the White House next month.
Opposition to data centres is now bipartisan, and the polling shows it
A national survey conducted earlier this month found 61 per cent of Americans opposed a data centre being built in their own community, including 47 per cent of Republicans. On Trump’s core claim, that towns without data centres will be left behind, 51 per cent said they disagreed with him.The resistance is already changing outcomes on the ground. The research group Data Center Watch counted at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed by local campaigns in the first three months of 2026 alone. Monterey Park in California, Prince William County in Virginia and Wake County in North Carolina have all fought proposals and won.
Electricity bills, not artificial intelligence, are what residents object to
The complaints tend to be practical rather than ideological. Residents point to rising utility bills, groundwater use in drought-hit states, constant low-frequency noise and farmland disappearing under windowless sheds. In New Mexico, an environmental group has challenged well-drilling permits tied to Project Jupiter, a $165 billion Oracle and OpenAI complex planned near the Mexican border. Nationally, Oracle, Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft expect to put more than $700 billion into US data centres this year alone.Vice President JD Vance, speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday, put a number on it. Nearly all the backlash, he said, comes from places where a new data centre means a higher power bill for people living next to it. His proposed fix is that operators should be adding electricity to the grid rather than drawing it out.
Republicans in tight races are walking away from Trump’s position
Texas Governor Greg Abbott spent a year selling data centres before ordering regulators to hold approvals pending audits, and has promised to go after the state’s billion-dollar-plus annual tax break for them. New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year ban on large projects in July. Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers and Stacy Garrity, running for governor in Pennsylvania, have both called for temporary halts.The sharpest test is Ohio, where Sherrod Brown has spent millions on advertising that brands Senator Jon Husted the face of data centres in the state, and where a Republican Senate campaign memo called the issue the anchor around Husted’s neck. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany is running an ad that renames his Democratic opponent “Data Center David Crowley”. Crowley has since said no community should be forced to take a project it does not want.Trump is betting that the argument about beating China outranks the argument about the monthly power bill. November will show whether that bet holds.