Trump says refusing a data centre is a mistake. Abbott disagrees

Texas governor Greg Abbott says data centre companies brought the backlash on themselves.

“They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “And that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

Andrew Pantazi and Ben Geman reported the remarks for Axios. They called them one of the starkest warnings yet from a Republican to the AI industry.

What he blamed

Abbott put the data centre backlash down to two things. The first is the sheer speed of the buildout. The second is developers arriving in communities without first winning them over.

“Gaining the support of people in local communities is essential,” he said.

Abbott has not said which of his own decisions he would take back.

Nine months ago he was selling it

Last November, Abbott stood alongside Google to announce a $40bn investment in three Texas data centre campuses. He called the state the epicentre of AI development.

In June he told regulators to make data centres pay the full cost of the electrical infrastructure they need. He also called for the tax incentives to be phased out.

This month he ordered regulators to audit every project seeking a grid connection before it can proceed.

Last week he told Fox News Sunday that fewer than 10% of data centre companies had answered a state request for information. Texas needs it to forecast future power demand.

A reporter in Austin queried the premise

Abbott said data centres must first get the approval of local communities. Texas law grants no such approval authority, the Texas journalist Suzanne Bellsnyder wrote on X.

His own written plan says to consider community impacts, she noted, which is a different thing.

Trump says the opposite

The president used a radio interview with his former fixer Michael Cohen, aired in full on Sunday, to defend the buildout.

“Communities that don’t take a data center, they’re making a mistake,” he said, because they bring “tremendous amounts of jobs and money”.

He said the United States leads China in AI by a lot, and that data centres are not taking power from the grid. “They’re making their own power plants. They’re building the most beautiful, you’ve never seen power plants like this.”

Rebecca Falconer reported the interview for Axios, and checked that last claim. Some data centres do build behind-the-meter plants that supply them directly. Others draw from the grid.

What Washington has actually done

The administration has loosened some environmental requirements while pushing operators to carry more of the electricity cost.

Last month the Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance on plants that are not connected to the public grid. Those fall outside the Clean Air Act’s Acid Rain Program, it said, which expands the options for dedicated data centre generation.

Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge asks operators to build, bring or buy the power they use, and to cover the infrastructure that comes with it.

He has already called Texas saying no to data centres a mistake, on the grounds that the industry could be bigger than oil.

Democrats moved first

Josh Shapiro celebrated a $20bn Amazon investment in Pennsylvania last year. This week he imposed new restrictions.

Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year moratorium on hyperscaler data centres in New York last month. Trump called it a terrible decision. She did not move.

The polling behind the pivots

61% of Americans now oppose a new data centre being built in their area, according to an Annenberg Public Policy Center survey last month. In March the figure was 49%.

The opposition crosses party lines. Annenberg found 69% of Democrats against, 54% of Republicans and 53% of independents.

Republicans are the ones panicking

Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt revealed last week that the National Republican Senatorial Committee had warned leading AI companies about the problem directly. Voter anger over data centres was endangering the party’s hold on a critical Ohio Senate seat.

Nobody expected that, Pantazi and Geman wrote. Sceptics have questioned the buildout for years. What nobody predicted was red-state Republicans worried about losing an election over it.

Bill Kristol drew his own conclusion. A pivot this large makes you wonder what Abbott’s polling shows about his own race, he wrote on X.

Not everyone thinks it decides anything

The Republican strategist Logan Dobson pushed back on the framing. Data centres are part of the conversation but not the electoral issue, he wrote, and polls put them below affordability.

He offered a data point. The highest-profile candidate to run on an explicit moratorium, Francesca Hong, lost.

The jobs and money question

Data centres create construction jobs and then run on a skeleton staff, Benedict Collins noted for TechRadar. The firms doing the building are often not local.

Meta says tax revenue from its Louisiana campus has paid local teachers bonuses of as much as $50,000. Meta also received $3.3bn in tax exemptions for that site.

Ohio projected a $136m revenue loss from its data centre tax exemptions. Governor Mike DeWine says the figure has reached $1.6bn. Several states are now repealing or rewriting those exemptions.

Axios makes a related point. Data centres deliver fewer permanent jobs than the warehousing and manufacturing deals that usually earn incentives of this size.

What it could cost the buildout

The industry response so far has been persuasion and money. AI companies are spending heavily on the midterms.

If the anger hardens into more moratoriums, slower permitting and abandoned projects, Axios argues, it constrains the computing infrastructure the AI companies are counting on.

What is unresolved

Abbott has not said what approval from a local community would formally consist of, or where in Texas law it would sit.

Neither he nor Trump has said what happens to projects already permitted under the rules each of them helped write.