President Donald Trump on Wednesday told data center developers to strike financial deals with the communities where they build. He said operators should pay local residents a “dividend” to turn opposition into support.
The call to action, posted on Truth Social, comes as resistance to the AI infrastructure buildout grows ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, with investors reevaluating the debt-heavy companies behind the financing of the buildout.
For financial advisors whose clients hold AI stocks, utilities and data center credit, the rising political price of the boom in data centers may be a trend worth watching.
“I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck. MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!! GREAT FOR THE U.S.A.,” Trump wrote.
As reported by CNBC and Reuters as well as other outlets, the Truth Social post was laden with urgency, but short on specifics. The president suggested payments could go to the community “and/or individuals within the community,” though he didn't offer details on how such a dividend would be sized, funded or distributed.
President Trump paired the idea with a demand on power. In a separate post, he said: “New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data (centers) are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid.”
While Trump has long supported data center construction, and he is now pushing against a clear shift in public opinion. In a Pew Research Center survey of more than 10,000 adults conducted in July, 54% said data centers are mostly bad for the environment, up from 39% in January. Half said the facilities are mostly bad for home energy costs, compared with 38% at the start of the year. And 49% said they hurt quality of life for people living nearby, up from 30%.
Just 4% said data centers have a mostly good effect in each of those areas. Sixty percent shared a NIMBY (not in my backyard) view on such structures, saying they would be not too or not at all comfortable with a new data center operating in their area.
The shift crosses party lines. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 42% now say data centers are mostly bad for nearby quality of life, up from 24% in January. Opinion has moved even more among rural Americans, who live where most new projects are planned. Half of them now say the centers are mostly bad for the environment, compared with 32% in January.
Last month, a contingent of Senate Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed executives at Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet to disclose the tax deductions they've claimed for AI and data center development under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, tying those tax breaks to public concerns around AI.
"Republicans in Washington have passed tax subsidies for AI development and AI data centers," they wrote.
Some operators say they are open to the idea. Marc Boroditsky, chief revenue officer at AI infrastructure company Nebius, told CNBC his company is “100% in principle” having discussions about investing in communities.
“We see it today in terms of the tax revenue that are arriving. I could see something like a benefit of some sort that’s more direct economic opportunity for the community as well,” Boroditsky said on the sidelines of Nvidia’s GTC Berlin conference.
While he said builders are already offering dividends through "investing in education, job development, [and] overall economic development," Boroditsky said "The concept that the president identified... it’s not crazy to consider something like that.”
At the moment, power is the more pressing problem. “Energy is always a bottleneck, and trying to find powered land and areas that we can build large-scale AI factories is a big focus for us,” said Chase Lochmiller, chief executive of compute infrastructure firm Crusoe. “Increasingly there’s a lot of policy permitting and just working through local communities to make sure that everything can come online effectively.”
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee nodded to that same dynamic recently in a Yahoo! Finance interview, describing how business owners in his own district have aired frustrations at soaring costs they tied to tech giants eating into local resources.
The politics are arriving as the sector’s finances draw closer scrutiny. As CNBC reported, data center stocks came under pressure this week on concerns about the industry’s financial health. Operators are also turning more often to debt markets to fund increasingly expensive projects, and any community dividend would only add to those costs and ratchet up pressure to find financing.
For HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery, the growing scrutiny on pick-and-shovel providers to the AI gold rush means investors should not treat data centers as a single trade.
“You have to look at the quality of the tenancy agreements. You have to look at the pricing of these contracts," he told CNBC on Tuesday. "Not all of them are of that level of virtuosity that you can support strongly. Some of them may be more challenging.”
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