'Let data reign'; Trump warns that those who don't let AI data centers proliferate will end up 'backwards and poor'

AI data center construction is now a hot-button topic in the US President Trump wants constituents to embrace data centers or risk falling behind Trump does not address energy, resource, or other growing concerns The growth and expansion of generative AI is unprecedented, surpassed only, perhaps, by the rapid expansion and impact of the data centers that support it.

While anti-data center sentiment is on the rise , US President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social social media platform on Monday to urge people to support rapid data center growth, warning those who oppose that "the only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is that they want to end up being backwards and poor." Before we dive into the rest of Trump's post, it's worth stepping back to look at data center construction growth and the more recent and somewhat remarkable backlash.

Data centers are not just an artificial intelligence phenomenon.

These large buildings packed with servers and connected to the Internet have been around for decades and initially marked their greatest expansion during the rise of the World Wide Web.

As the Internet grew in the 1990s and the number of websites skyrocketed, data centers that could keep copies of these sites and their data and then serve them to whoever wanted to access them around the world popped up around the world.

Modern-day cloud systems like Amazon Web Services (AWS) serve millions of websites with a reported 900 data centers .

The recent rapid rise of AI usage around the globe in the form of ChatGPT , Claude , and Gemini has supercharged a new kind of data center growth.

While traditional cloud servers relied on relatively efficient CPUs, generative AI demands more powerful and power-hungry GPUs, primarily from Nvidia.

Power-hungry AI According to the World Resources Institute, a single AI data center can eat as much energy as 100,000 homes .

When you consume that kind of energy, you also generate a lot of heat, and one of the other earmarks of modern AI data centers is their use of water for cooling.

The WRI reports that a large AI data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water a day.

Finally, these large data centers can be loud, producing a constant hum that can be heard in nearby communities.

These issues are being amplified by the stunning growth of these data centers.

Cleanview reports roughly 3,400 US data centers , with another 2,059 planned.