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 F2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Trump warns towns without data centers will be 'backwards and poor'; an AI startup builds elsewhere: Saudi Arabia.
As it ran on the front
Run the filing against the announcement, hon, and see where the two line up. The announcement: communities that don't build data centers will be "backwards and poor," delivered as a warning to American towns weighing whether to host the next one. The filing, same week: an American AI startup setting up its own camp in Saudi Arabia specifically to avoid the domestic backlash those same data centers generate here.
So the pitch to American communities is build it or be backwards and poor. The pitch the company itself is acting on is build it somewhere else, where the backlash doesn't apply. Those are two different instructions issued to two different parties about the exact same asset, in the same news cycle. One column says stay, one column says leave. Nobody reconciled the columns before either statement went out.…
…(cont) The backlash being avoided isn't hypothetical — it's the reason the filing exists in the first place. Data centers pull power off the same grid the neighbors are on, and they pull water where water's available, and the communities pushing back on that aren't doing it for sport; they're doing it because somebody ran their own numbers on their utility bill. The company reading those numbers decided Saudi Arabia was the more comfortable jurisdiction. The administration, meanwhile, is telling American towns their comfort isn't the metric — backwardness is the metric, and poverty is the alternative.
That's the gap: one address gets the warning, a different address gets the accommodation. The warning lands on towns with no lobbyist in the room. The accommodation lands wherever the backlash is thinnest, which this week happens to be overseas. Nobody wrote a check to make either of those things true; they just both happened to be filed in the same week, under two different bylines, describing the same industry from opposite directions.
File it and move on. The number worth watching isn't in either headline — it's whichever utility bill shows up next quarter in the town that built the one Saudi Arabia declined.
“They tell your town build the data center or stay poor, and the company doing the building ships its own operation to Saudi Arabia to dodge the exact backlash they're daring you to eat — that's the tell right there, they know what it costs.”
“Communities that embrace next-generation infrastructure will see economic benefits, and companies pursuing international expansion is just standard growth strategy, unrelated to any domestic siting concerns — the Saudi Arabia timing is coincidental, I haven't looked into it closely, but I'm confident it's coincidental.”
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.