President Donald Trump criticized the rising wave of anti-data center sentiment, clashing with his administration’s aggressive efforts to build out the domestic artificial intelligence sector. Trump has placed a concerted focus on making…
Page F3From§Eachthe noon edition — 31 August 2026
Trump warns towns without data centers will be 'backwards and poor'; US startup builds one in Saudi Arabia.
As it ran on the front
Here's the filing, laid out plain. Line one: the President tells American communities that if they don't build data centers, they'll end up 'backwards and poor.' That's a warning aimed at towns — the ones expected to supply the land, the water, the tax abatements, and the power grid capacity a data center needs. Line two, same week: an American AI startup announces it's setting up its own data center operation in Saudi Arabia, specifically to get out ahead of the backlash those facilities generate here at home.
Run those two lines against each other and they don't reconcile. If data centers are the thing separating the prosperous towns from the backwards ones, the company actually building the technology just chose to build its capacity somewhere else. Not because the market's better. Because the backlash is worse here, and it's worse here for reasons — water usage, power draw, property values — that residents in those "backwards" towns have been raising for a while now.…
…(cont) So the ask lands on the town: rezone, subsidize, accept the water and power costs, or fall behind. The company's own decision, filed the same week, is to make that exact bet abroad instead. That's not a hypothetical gap. That's two stories printed days apart.
I'll note the shape of who bears which side of this ledger. The towns get the warning and, if they build, the water bill and the tax abatement request. The company gets the choice of jurisdiction, and when the backlash gets heavy enough, the company gets to leave the country entirely and build the same facility somewhere with fewer questions asked. One side of this arrangement has an exit. The other side has a warning label.
I don't have a dollar figure for the Saudi facility in this reporting, hon, and I'm not going to invent one. What I can tell you is that "build it or be poor" and "we're building ours elsewhere" were both filed in the same week, from the same industry, and only one of those groups has the option to just leave.
“He's telling towns to build data centers or stay poor, meanwhile the actual AI company is building its data center in Saudi Arabia to dodge the backlash here. Read that twice. The threat's for you, the exit's for them.”
“Companies pursue the most efficient regulatory environment, that's just sound business, it's not a comment on American communities, it's purely a jurisdictional — okay it is leaving specifically to avoid the backlash here, that part's in the reporting, I can't spin around that one.”
The receipts
A U.S.-based artificial intelligence startup is partnering with the Saudi Arabian government’s AI firm for a major expansion of its computing infrastructure, as technology companies face growing resistance to data centers powering the AI…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.