President Donald Trump said this week that any governor or local government official should want to welcome the construction of AI data centers, arguing that the facilities bring substantial economic benefits to the communities that host them.

Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, during a meeting with technology and cryptocurrency industry leaders in the Roosevelt Room, the president emphasized the scale of the ongoing construction effort.

"The construction jobs are enormous. We're building the biggest plants anywhere in the world. And I can say, if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous," Trump said.

"And if you don't take it, you're going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it," he added. "But if I were a governor or mayor, I would want that plant in my community. And many of them are designed in a very beautiful way. It's really very positive."

Public Opinion Remains a Hurdle

Trump also suggested that the AI industry needs "a little public relations help," noting that a majority of Americans oppose having data centers built in their communities, according to a Gallup poll from May. Americans surveyed in that poll were largely concerned with the potential environmental impact of data centers, as well as their need for large amounts of electricity and water to run.

Those concerns track with the industry's measurable footprint: a Department of Energy-commissioned study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity in 2023 and projected the figure could climb to as much as 12 percent by 2028, depending on the pace of AI adoption. Some officials Trump is courting have pushed back as well: Georgia lawmakers paused sales-tax incentives for large data centers in 2025, and legislators in Virginia — home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, in the Washington, D.C. suburbs — have weighed new requirements around grid planning and community notice.

In response to a reporter who asked what Trump would say to those who remain reticent about AI, the president again pointed to job creation, but also to medical innovation.

"I think it's going to create a lot of jobs. It's going to create success. It's going to create tremendous innovation medically," Trump said. "They came out with something today that I looked at it having to do— I won't go into the details, but having to do with a pretty unstoppable disease, and all of a sudden they're coming up with answers that they never thought were possible."

A Light-Touch Approach to Regulation

Trump also gave some limited insight into how he would approach regulating AI, an industry he said "may be bigger than the internet."

"We're leading by a lot with AI. We want to keep it that way. We want to regulate, but we want to have regulation where they can continue to lead, not regulation that's going to stifle a very important industry," he said.

The president referenced his administration's recent bid to encourage data center developers and tech companies to secure new sources of electricity, easing pressure on power grids while preventing the costs from being passed on to American households. He also touted a July executive order that calls for the permitting process for data centers to be expedited, and which established an interagency task force to coordinate faster federal reviews and identify federal sites for new facilities. Taken together, the two efforts reflect where the administration's attention is concentrated: adding electricity supply and shortening approval timelines to enable the buildout, consistent with the light-touch approach Trump described.

A Long-Standing AI Advocate

Trump has long been bullish on AI. On Jan. 21, 2025, his second day back in office, he announced "Stargate," a private-sector joint venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and the Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX that planned to invest up to $500 billion in U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. The effort has since expanded to multiple data-center projects across the country, with its flagship facility in Abilene, Texas, partially operational.