President Donald Trump took a firm stand in defense of the rapid expansion of massive data centers on Saturday, warning supporters at an Ohio rally that blocking the tech projects would hand a decisive advantage to China.
Speaking at Butler High School in Vandalia, outside Dayton, Trump urged voters to back Republican Sen. Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in the November 3 midterm elections — repeatedly telling the battleground-state crowd to act as though he himself were on the ballot.
“There’s so much money to be made for Ohio. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China,” Trump told the audience.
Data centers at the center of the midterm debate
The surge in data center development has triggered a bipartisan backlash across the country, as communities grapple with the enormous amounts of electricity, water and land the facilities require. The biggest fight has centered on who should pay for the infrastructure needed to serve the projects: utilities may need to build new power plants, substations and transmission lines, raising concerns that households and other businesses could be stuck with higher bills if those costs are spread across the broader rate base.
Water use, noise and sprawling footprints have also fueled resistance, particularly where projects sit near homes or rely on strained water supplies. Critics have questioned the generous state and local tax breaks given to facilities that can cost billions of dollars to build yet employ relatively few workers once construction is finished. Political pressure has already prompted several states to pause tax breaks or permitting, while others push special utility rates aimed at making developers shoulder more of the cost.
Trump backed legislation pushed by Husted that he said would “stop data centers from raising electricity costs and require them to pay their own way,” and said nearly every Senate Democrat had voted days earlier to block the measure. He vowed to sign the Ratepayer Protection Act “into law immediately within 24 hours” if Republicans prevailed.
The AI race with China
Trump tied the data center boom to the global race over artificial intelligence, saying the United States was ahead of China in what he repeatedly called “superintelligence.” He argued that turning the facilities away would weaken America’s position. “We’re beating China,” he said.
The Ohio stop followed campaign visits to Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama this week, part of what Trump says will be a 32-day campaign tour ahead of the midterms.
Source: New York Post