President Donald Trump says he isn’t sure he would want a data center in his backyard.
“I would like to have data centers,” Trump told Time Magazine as part of a cover story interview published on Thursday. “It doesn’t mean I want them right next to my house, but certainly I like them in my county.”
Trump has repeatedly defended the benefits of data centers and the AI industry more broadly, as polling shows widespread public skepticism. Republican governors have also begun to rein in incentives for data centers.
Communities that don’t welcome data centers, Trump said, are also passing up on potentially lucrative tax revenue. As he has before, the president portrayed communities that oppose data center development as wrong and impoverished.
“If you want to be poor, you want to have no money, if you don’t want to have a job, and if you want to live in a crime-infested area, squalor, all the things that go along with it, you should not have a data center,” he said.
Amid the growing backlash against data centers, some AI and tech leaders have begun considering other ways to supply the compute they need to train and then run cutting-edge AI models. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is pursuing orbital data centers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested data centers are better suited for deserts.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
As he welcomed AI executives to the White House on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that data centers would become “very popular” as residents see what their cooperation will bring to their communities.
“They’re going to make the community happy,” Trump said. “That might be supplying oil and gas. It might be supplying education. It may be helping teachers along financially, helping people along financially.”
Trump described how, in some cases, a data center can be “right next to a guy’s house,” a reality some residents in Loudoun County, Virginia, face.
Loudoun County, home to the famed “Data Center Alley,” once allowed many data centers to be built by right, including some near residential neighborhoods. In 2025, county supervisors ended by-right approvals for new data centers. New proposals must now go through a review process that includes public hearings, among other steps.
Trump’s hope for a data center in his county is also complicated.
Last week, the Palm Beach County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on the construction of large-scale data centers. Before the vote, the commissioners rejected a proposed plan for a hyperscale data center, WPTV reported.
A smaller data center plan for the site, which was previously approved, is expected to proceed.
