President Donald Trump opened the week by telling American communities that resisting data centers means choosing poverty. In a Monday morning Truth Social post, Trump told communities rejecting data centers that the only reason to oppose the facilities “is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”
He promised the opposite path leads to prosperity, urging towns that want to be successful and rich to “let Data Reign.” He closed with a familiar boogeyman, claiming “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
Every load bearing claim in that post collapses under the industry’s own numbers. The permanent jobs are scarce, the tax breaks flow from local taxpayers to some of the richest corporations on earth, and household electric bills near many of these facilities are climbing fast.
The Jobs Disappear When The Construction Crews Leave
Trump’s promise of “jobs all over the place” describes the construction phase and little else. A 2017 U.S. Chamber of Commerce review of 244 large facilities across 16 states found the average data center employs 1,688 workers while being built but only 157 permanent staff once the servers hum to life.
Individual deals look even worse. One Microsoft facility in Illinois collected more than $38 million in sales tax exemptions and produced 20 permanent jobs.
In New York, JPMorgan Chase secured a $77 million tax break for a data center expansion expected to create exactly one permanent job, and a separate $19 million deal for Morgan Stanley is due to produce four.
Communities Pay For The Privilege
The president also promised “far lower taxes.” The record shows communities buying data centers with their own tax base instead.
Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks corporate subsidies, examined major projects from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google and found the incentives averaged nearly $2 million for every permanent position created. North Carolina’s deal with Apple reached $6.4 million per job.
Many state exemptions on hardware and software purchases run for decades, in some cases as long as 40 years, and often come paired with full or partial property tax breaks. Virginia’s data center sales tax exemption alone cost an estimated $1.6 billion in a single fiscal year.
The Electric Bill Trump Never Mentioned
Nowhere in the post did the president acknowledge the cost that has actually turned voters against these projects. Retail electricity prices have risen nearly 40% since 2021, the fastest stretch of growth on record, and fact checkers reviewing federal data found data centers have been a major driver in some of the places where costs climbed most, including a 94% jump in residential rates in Washington, D.C. over five years.
The pain is not evenly shared. One analysis of federal pricing data found residential rates rose 25% between 2020 and 2024 while the prices data centers pay barely moved, and subsidy researchers note the largest operators can negotiate their power rates directly with utilities, a privilege no household enjoys.
States are already responding, and not along party lines. Republican and Democratic leaders in at least a dozen states have moved to charge data centers separate, higher electric rates to protect other customers, and New York ordered the first statewide moratorium in July to study the impact on communities and energy prices.
Even His Own Voters Are Not Buying It
A Fox News survey last month found 70% of Americans opposed building a data center in their area, including 60% of Republicans. An Economist/YouGov poll taken in late August showed Trump’s own 2024 voters opposing new local facilities by a margin of 47% to 35%.
The backlash is registering inside his party too. A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo warned that Democrats are making data centers the centerpiece of their campaign against Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio, and Ohio’s other Republican senator, Bernie Moreno, publicly demanded that the Carlyle Group return a $4.5 million state subsidy for a data center expansion.
As for the China line, data center investors have been pushing that claim for months. Kevin O’Leary asserted without evidence that Beijing was behind local protests, later admitted he had none, and is now being sued for defamation by two Utah advocacy groups. The movement Trump is attacking is not a foreign operation. It is a supermajority of the American public reading its own utility bills.
Trump called those people backwards. Democratic Reporter will keep publishing the numbers he left out, because holding this administration accountable means following every dollar in these deals, from the tax breaks to the rate hikes. If this reporting matters to you, subscribe and share it with someone whose electric bill just went up.
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