Trump Orders Data Centers to Power Themselves

President Trump said Wednesday he would require new and large data centers to provide their own electricity and give or sell excess power to nearby communities or the grid. He said the measure would keep electricity prices from rising. Whether it works matters to ordinary households, which don’t sit on the boards of companies building these facilities.

Trump announced the plan on Truth Social. “In fact, there could be a substantial decrease. Other elements likewise!” he wrote. He acknowledged that data centers had been “highly unpopular in a certain area,” but said they became “extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.” He urged operators to “MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!!”

The Cost on Ordinary Households

The price pressure behind this debate is real, and people with the least room in their budgets feel it most. Dozens of companies, including Meta, Amazon and Google, have agreed to pay higher energy costs caused by their data centers through Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge. That commitment matters, but it relies on voluntary agreements, not binding rules that would apply to every facility.

Water adds another burden that doesn’t appear on a power bill. A medium-sized data center can use up to about 110 million gallons of water a year for cooling, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute last year. That’s roughly the annual water use of 1,000 households. In communities already strained by drought or aging infrastructure, someone has to absorb that demand.

Official Response and the Politics of Opposition

Trump has made his view of critics clear. Last month, he claimed data-center opponents wanted “poverty, crime and squalor” and accused communities resisting the facilities of wanting to be “backwards and poor.” Earlier this month, during a tight Senate race in Ohio, he stressed how “much money” the state would make. Some Ohioans had criticized data-center development, and opponents have faulted Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) for pushing to bring the facilities to the state while serving as lieutenant governor.

Trump defended the buildout at a rally for Husted. “You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China,” he said. Technology companies make a similar argument: data centers, they say, are needed to support artificial intelligence development. That case deserves a hearing. But it doesn’t answer who pays when the grid strains and bills climb.

What Communities Are Doing

Americans have grown wary of these projects because of electricity costs, pressure on water resources, noise and air pollution. Local officials must weigh real tax revenue against those costs. Some communities have collected more tax money from data centers, while others have offered tax breaks to attract investment. Ohio and Illinois have paused some of those tax incentive programs in recent months. New York went further, instituting the nation’s first statewide freeze on new “hyperscale” data centers.

The patchwork tells its own story. States are acting because federal rules haven’t kept pace, leaving residents to negotiate terms alone. A pause is blunt. But it reflects a public that wants a say before a facility gets built next to its homes.

Security Concerns Add to the Unease

Opposition has also grown over fears about artificial intelligence itself. Those concerns followed recent attempted and successful hacks into government websites, raising questions about risks from rogue software. They also followed a warning from former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that AI could become an existential threat to humanity by the end of the decade. Whatever one thinks of that warning, it has led more people to ask who is accountable for these systems and who gets to decide how fast they expand.

Why This Matters:

The president’s order would shift a major infrastructure question from local negotiation toward a federal rule, and that matters to families already watching their utility bills. If officials enforce the requirement, large data centers could bear the costs they create instead of passing them to other ratepayers. If the plan relies on voluntary pledges and deal-making alone, people most exposed to rising prices and strained water supplies may still carry the load. The gap between a promise of lower prices and a binding guarantee is where accountability gets decided. Public oversight, transparent reporting on energy and water use, and enforceable commitments from the companies involved would give communities a real voice in decisions shaping their costs and environment for years.