President Donald Trump made an aggressive case for data centers at an Oval Office press availability on Friday. “If you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you’re going to want a data center,” Trump said. “If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don’t approve data centers. You have your choice.” <\/p>\n
REPORTER: What is your message to communities who say they don’t like data centers and they’re worried AI could become dangerous? PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I look at data centers very, very carefully. I mean, being formerly in the real estate business, I was really good at real estate. And I can tell you, if I were running a state or a town, if I was a mayor or governor, I would want as many data centers as I can because they throw off tremendous amounts of money. They don’t take any energy because, you know, the new ones that I approved, they all create their own energy. They were giving them the right to build their own power plant. So they don’t have to use the grid. They’re actually taking their excess energy and they’re building some incredible plants along with the building. So they’re building their own generation plant and the excess is going back into the grid. So we’re actually making money on that. It’s going to bring energy costs down. However, the the data centers, you want to pay a little bit of the right location. But if you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you’re going to want a data center. If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don’t approve data centers. You have your choice. So I’m all for people approving them or not. But if you look at places that have really gotten wealthy and rich and lower taxes and it’s where properly approved data centers have have been allowed to go up now. If they don’t approve them, there’s a lot of places that want them, both in this country and in particular in China, all over the world, they want them. So I don’t like seeing where that opportunity would be squandered. And the people that squandered are going to come back in five years, say, wow, we made a big mistake because that place is located at a different location and everybody’s gotten rich. So I think if you want success, you have to go with the data. You want them to be proper. You want to check them for sound and, you know, all the different things. But but again, they create their own electricity. So you’re not going to have a problem there. The water is going to be they do in so many different ways, including desalinization and everything else. These data centers are making a fortune for people that live relatively near them. Doesn’t mean you want to be right in their backyard. But for people that live in the area of data centers, they’ve been an unbelievable success. REPORTER: Do you have any concerns about A.I. veering out of control and launching cyber attacks? TRUMP: No, we watch it very carefully. We’re leading China in A.I. and whoever wins, A.I. wins. That’s the power. This is bigger than the Internet. This is a revolution. You know, we’ve had a few of them over the last 200 years. But this is a revolution. And I’ve seen some results that are incredible medically. You know, we’re coming up with things medically that we wouldn’t have maybe in 100 years. Whoever wins with A.I. wins. It’s really right now. It’s really between China and us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n