Despite recent polls showing that 70% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their area (including 60% of Republicans), President Trump on Monday warned that communities that don’t embrace them will “end up being backwards and poor.”
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
And if people “kill the Golden Goose” by successfully resisting AI data centers, “you will only have yourselves to blame,” Trump continued, adding “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
According to a Gallup poll published in May, 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their local area, including 48% ‘strongly opposed’ – and only about a quarter in favor. Opposition crosses party lines: Gallup’s breakdowns showed 63% of Republicans strongly or somewhat opposed to a data center where they live, while a July Fox News poll found that 60% of Republicans and 53% of self-described “MAGA Republicans” oppose data centers where they live.
At the same time, Beijing structurally benefits from anything that slows US compute (and according to X, are amplifying the outrage).
Some observations
- Eighteen months ago, American frontier models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI had virtually no competition – and the entire AI bubble (circle-jerk) was based on already-insane revenue projections.
- Then, Chinese labs began rolling out open-weighted AI models that are up to 90% cheaper per token, for around 95% the same performance as US frontier models. Suddenly, the American AI buildout thesis that led the market to all-time highs this year, was pricked – and companies are migrating towards these cheap Chinese models they can run on their own infrastructure. Chinese providers went from under 2% of OpenRouter tokens a year ago to over 45% of weekly volume by April 2026, and Chinese models surpassed US models in weekly token volume for the first time in February. An a16z partner estimated roughly 80% of US startups build on Chinese base models.
- The July tape made it official: chip stocks shed more than $1 trillion as investors began asking whether AI infrastructure spending is peaking faster than expected – even as the hyperscalers, undeterred, still guide to roughly $660-690 billion in 2026 capex, nearly double last year’s.
- Chinese AI firms are also starting to run proprietary chips – a workaround to years of banning Nvidia’s top of the line AI chips. Beijing’s Cyberspace Administration barred major tech firms from buying Nvidia chips in September 2025, and state-backed data centers now require domestic silicon. Domestic suppliers are projected to capture nearly 90% of Chinese AI accelerator sales this year. That said, Huawei’s Ascend still trails Nvidia on raw performance and software, and its flagship CloudMatrix cluster draws roughly four times the power of Nvidia’s comparable system – a trade Beijing happily makes, because China is substituting electricity (which it has) for chip quality (which it doesn’t).
- China is also able to rapidly expand both data centers and electricity generation because the CCP gives zero fucks about NIMBY Chinese ‘having a say’ over whether they plunk a loud data center or power generation facility next to their house. Instead, provincial officials are rewarded for building, the grid is state-owned, and the new Five-Year Plan explicitly treats data centers as a demand sink to soak up surplus renewable generation. In China, data centers are the solution to too much electricity. In America, they’ve become the cause of expensive electricity.
China Is Loving This
Trump isn’t wrong that Beijing benefits from anything that slows the US buildout. But the astroturf version of the argument was quickly dispelled: data center investor Kevin O’Leary claimed China was behind the protests, admitted he had no evidence, and is now being sued for defamation by two Utah groups. And the polling is real too – Heatmap asked the identical question about data centers in Americans’ backyards four times in 12 months and watched a 33-point collapse, from a 43/42 split last August to 75% opposed now. Public opinion doesn’t move like that because of foreign bots. It moves like that because of utility bills.
The grievances have receipts. PJM’s independent market monitor found data centers responsible for 63% of the capacity auction spike – $9.3 billion recovered from ratepayers in a single year, with measured bill impacts of $21/month in DC, $18 in western Maryland, $16 in Ohio. Total PJM capacity costs went from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion to $16.1 billion in two years – and the latest auction only stopped at $329.17/MW-day because of a price cap Pennsylvania’s governor demanded. Gallup’s own open-ended data shows what’s actually driving opposition: half of opponents cite resource consumption – 18% each naming water and energy – plus noise, pollution, and traffic. Not anti-AI ideology. Bills.
And when the industry had the chance to carry its own costs, PJM members voted down all 12 proposals to shift them in July. Ratepayers remain the unpaid sponsors of the buildout. Meanwhile, dozens of companies – including Meta, Amazon and Google – have signed onto Trump’s “ratepayer protection pledge” to cover increased energy costs. You don’t create a ratepayer protection pledge against an imaginary grievance.
Meanwhile this is about as bipartisan as it gets: Greg Abbott has frozen new data centers in Texas, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee – Senate Republicans’ own campaign arm, warned in an August memo that the campaign against them “will expand far beyond Ohio,” where the issue has Jon Husted in a dead heat with Sherrod Brown – a Democrat Ohio voters fired statewide just two years ago.
And what Trump fails to see, apparently: the CCP would entertain exactly none of this. There is no mechanism in China for citizens to oppose infrastructure – and what the no-veto model produces isn’t just speed. Many local-government data centers run at 20-30% utilization, Beijing is now planning a national scheme to resell the surplus compute, and even SMIC’s own chairman warned the rushed buildout “has not been fully thought through.” The people of Licking County get a say. The people of Gansu get a ghost data center.
Trump says China “can’t believe” the anti-data-center movement is happening. Of course not – there is no version of it available to Chinese citizens.
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