President Donald Trump sat down with the wealthiest executives in artificial intelligence at the White House on Tuesday and told the country three things about AI data centers: everybody wants them, the towns that host them get rich, and taxes go down. All three claims collapse the moment you check them against the record.
The setting was an event the White House billed as a Super Intelligence Luncheon, hosted by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, with Elon Musk and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang seated beside the president and the leaders of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, OpenAI, and Anthropic around the table. When the cameras rolled, Trump talked up the benefits of data centers and pressed for the industry to regulate itself.
“Even in America, there are so many people that want data centers,” Trump said. “The areas with data centers have become very rich. People have become very rich. Their taxes have gone down, not up.”
The people paying the bills tell a different story.
Americans Do Not Want Them Next Door
Gallup asked the question directly this year, and the results were not close. The polling firm found that 70% of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local area, including 48% who are strongly opposed. Gallup even found that more Americans would rather live near a nuclear power plant than one of these facilities.
The numbers have only moved in one direction since. Heatmap Pro polling conducted by Embold Research in August put local opposition at 75%, with more than 6 in 10 Americans strongly opposed. An Economist and YouGov survey from late August found that only 14% of Democrats and 15% of independents would support a data center project in their own community.
That is the landscape Trump described as “so many people that want data centers.”
The Backlash Is Blocking Billions
Americans are not just telling pollsters. NBC News reported that data center opponents blocked or delayed 75 projects worth about $130 billion in the first three months of 2026, the most in any quarter since tracking began. Bloomberg reported that another 45 projects worth roughly $68 billion were stopped or stalled between April and June, and the research group behind those figures, Data Center Watch, now counts 843 local opposition groups across 49 states.
The revolt has reached statehouses. Maine lawmakers approved the first statewide moratorium in the country on large data centers this spring, New York’s governor ordered a statewide pause of her own in July, and the Minneapolis City Council approved a six month freeze while the city studies the impacts. This is the same backlash Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley dismissed as fake earlier this month, even as the blocked project totals kept climbing.
The Jobs Never Materialize
Trump’s claim that data center towns “become very rich” runs into the industry’s defining feature: these facilities are among the least labor intensive buildings in the American economy. Food & Water Watch estimates that as few as 23,000 Americans held a permanent data center job nationwide in 2024, and that in Virginia, the industry’s capital, recent projects have created roughly one permanent position for every $54 million invested.
The individual deals are even starker. Futurism reported that Cedar Rapids, Iowa approved more than $1.3 billion in data center construction with contracts obligating the developers to create exactly 61 permanent jobs. The Associated Press reported that Anthropic’s $50 billion data center investment will produce about 800 permanent jobs in total, roughly one job for every $60 million spent. Research published by the Brookings Institution found that local wages do not budge when data centers arrive, while home prices climb 2% to 5%.
Tax Breaks Are Bleeding State Budgets
The boldest claim of the afternoon was that taxes in data center communities “have gone down, not up.” Good Jobs First, the watchdog that tracks economic development subsidies, found state and local governments losing revenue at an unprecedented rate to data center tax breaks. Georgia raised its projected losses for this fiscal year by 664%, to $2.5 billion. Virginia is losing $1.6 billion a year. Texas is past $1.3 billion.
Ohio projected its exemption would cost $136 million in fiscal 2025, and the newsletter Popular Information reported it ended up costing more than $1.5 billion instead. Indiana disclosed $655 million in losses, with more than 83% of the money flowing to a single company, Amazon. Good Jobs First estimates Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia lost $38 million in one year to the exemption. Greg LeRoy, the group’s executive director, put it bluntly: “No form of state spending is more out of control today than data center tax abatements.”
The Power Bills Tell The Rest
Then there is the tax nobody legislated: the electric bill. Monitoring Analytics, the independent market monitor for the PJM grid that serves 67 million people across 13 states, found that data centers drove 63% of the increase in the region’s latest capacity auction, adding $9.3 billion in costs recovered from customers through higher rates. Capacity prices in that market have jumped roughly tenfold in two years, and an analysis reported by Canary Media found the average family could be paying about $70 more per month by 2028.
Americans have already connected the dots. The same Economist and YouGov poll found 60% of Americans believe a data center built in their community would raise their electricity costs.
Trump made his pitch on Tuesday seated beside the billionaires whose companies build and fill these facilities, the people for whom the “very rich” part of his claim is actually true. For everyone else, the record shows fewer jobs than promised, state budgets drained by the billions, and power bills climbing to subsidize the wealthiest corporations on earth. Democratic Reporter will keep tracking which communities pay the price and who pockets the difference.
