Posted on 07/23/2026 1:24:24 PM PDT by Miami Rebel
President Donald Trump is marching full steam ahead in support of “absolutely incredible” data centers being built across the United States, and told Americans: “You’re becoming a utility.”
The remarks came during Trump’s roughly 20 minute remarks during a Thursday visit to Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C., during which he called data centers a “really important subject.”
“It is something that you’re very familiar with. The people in the room are real doers. It’s an amazing group,” Trump continued.
“We are here today to continue the incredible progress we are making in communities nationwide, to ensure that as new data centers go up, and they’re going up all over, electricity bills for American families will actually come down.”
“You’re going to be building your own data centers, and you’re going to build your own electric plants. You are essentially becoming a utility, like Con Edison in New York,” he added.
“But maybe at a level that nobody’s ever seen before, because we’ve seen some of the plants they’re building are absolutely incredible. They’re absolutely incredible,” the president said.
“Electric plants, electric manufacturing plants. It’s hard to believe, but you need double the electricity that we have right now, maybe even more than that to really fulfill what you want to do.”
“We’re leading China by a lot, and using our old grid would not have worked. I came up with the idea: build your own plant. Nobody can complain. You won’t call me and say what a terrible job I’m doing because we have a 200-year-old grid that’s not the best in the world,” Trump also said.
“You look at some places. Take a look at California; they have brownouts and blackouts every weekend. The last thing they are going to be able to do is supply electric at numbers. Nobody has ever explained to me why it’s so much electricity, why you need so much. Nor did I care that much, to be honest with you.”
The president’s data center push comes as Americans are increasingly against construction of the facilities.
A poll by Emerson College published this week found 63% of voters in the U.S. oppose the centers being built in their communities; opponents often cite environmental concerns as a major reason why. The poll was conducted July 19 and 20.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
I predict this will hurt potus and the GOP more than any other issue...
Not a good comparison, with Con Edison doing brownouts impacting 400,000 customers this month.
People really don’t want them in their towns .
Almost like he is trying to sink the midterms on purpose………………
we should outsource all our IT infrastructure to china like we did our manufacturing. that worked out real well
That's a good point. It'll be interesting to see if red states can put good guardrails on data centers to have the positives without the negatives, while blue states do like they always do and make regulations that do more harm than good except being good and making the bureaucrats rich.
For example, I'd bet blue states force data centers to make their own power using solar or wind, stating that the rated power capacity is enough, knowing that the true power production throughput is a lot less. But red states might force data centers to produce more than enough steady power, so at least the criticism of data centers being power hungry wouldn't apply to citizens of red states.
I dunno if red states can probably regulate other issues like noise pollution and water consumption of data centers.
And that's during the short period that data centers are up and running. I expect much of the AI hype to die down (it seems to already be doing so) and many data centers be vacant, perhaps a lot of them not even finished building.
I am good with them as long as they are producing their own electricity and not driving up our prices!
I like it more that says if you don’t want these in your town, and you will never be able to use the Internet. Let’s see how they change their tune real quick people in these towns are China lovers and are doing everything they can to make China the number one economy of the world.
They used to same argument about importing cheap labor and h1b visa scammers from India “hey we have to beat China”
Will they be regulated like utilities?
TIN_EAR_PING!
Boo. Put one on Mar a Lago grounds—the rest of us don’t want them near us.
Noticeably absent is any plan to assure enough transformers are available. If your local utility can’t compete with data centers for transformers, your outage will be extended - maybe for months. Doesn’t matter how much generating capacity there is if you can’t distribute it.
MAGA!
“Noticeably absent is any plan to assure enough transformers are available.”
There are plans.
Doesn’t it? If he was a democrat, I would ask what’s his cut going to be?
Washington state has a lot of data centers all located in Eastern Washington which has a small population. Washington state is of course a very blue one-party communist state but it is also well positioned to handle data centers with our s,sfdjhuge hydro dams which are also located in Eastern Washington. Of course the greenies refuse to call hydro green which it really is.
The data centers will be much more productive than the windmills built over on farmland in Eastern Washington said windmills which seldom turn.
Electricity prices do not appear to have risen in the Seattle area but they would be much less if the state stopped selling to California, the forever baby that needs to be fed since they will not utilize their own resources.
Eastern Washington is red in our communist state which is controlled by the commies in the Puget Sound region on the west side of the state.
The smart localities will negotiate smartly for data centers with perks that are attractive to voters.
Bought the DSA line so soon?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.