This is what President-elect Donald Trump has announced Hussain Sajwani, an Emirati billionaire businessman who founded property development giant DAMAC Properties, will invest $20 billion in new data centers across the United States.
The first phase of the multi-year investment will fund data centers in Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, Trump said at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home on Tuesday. Data centers will primarily support AI and cloud technologies.
“We have been waiting for years to increase our investment in the US,” Sajwani said. “We're trying to invest $20 billion, and [potentially] More than that.”
No details were given about the investment at the press conference. It is important to note that the agreement may not be concluded at all. Similar investment commitments have soured in the past. In 2017, then-President Trump and then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced that Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn would spend $10 billion on a campus near Milwaukee. Within months, Foxconn began scaling back its plans. Wisconsin Public Radio reported that by the end of 2022, the chip giant had created about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin — a far cry from the 13,000 it promised — and spent just under $1 billion in early 2023.
Strong critic of Trump Law of ChipsOne of the signature policy achievements of the outgoing Biden administration. The law appropriated $39 billion in grants, plus 25% tax credit And billions more in loans to revive American semiconductor manufacturing after decades of manufacturing shifting to Asia.
Trump and other Republicans, including Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was briefly re-elected as House speaker last week, have threatened to repeal the CHIPS Act. In an interview with Joe Rogan last October, Trump accused Taiwan of stealing “our chip business” and called for tariffs on imported semiconductors.
The CHIPS Act, which passed in 2022 with bipartisan support, attracted investment from five of the world's top advanced chipmakers. Companies have pledged to spend more than ten times the Act's total grant, According to Bloomberg.
A number of tech leaders have called for the United States to increase investment in data center infrastructure, especially as the AI industry continues to grow at an explosive pace. AI systems require a lot of computing infrastructure to develop and run at scale.
Microsoft, which recently said it was on track to spend $80 billion on AI data centers, recently said a Blog post President Brad Smith wrote that the company's success depends on “new partnerships built on large-scale infrastructure investments.”
“The United States is poised to stand at the forefront of this new technology wave, especially if it redoubles its power and partners effectively internationally,” Smith wrote. “May strengthen the incoming administration [its] Building on the foundational elements, the work of President Trump's first term.”
in a the interview With Bloomberg published on Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said there is “a real opportunity to do a lot of good” for the Trump administration. [than the CHIPS Act] As a follow-on.”
“I don't think the CHIPS Act has worked as well as any of us expected,” Altman said. “That's something I really deeply agree with [President Trump] This is how hard it has become to make things in the US. Power plants, data centers, any kind of thing. I understand how bureaucratic craft is created, but it is not helpful for the country in general. That's not particularly helpful when you think about what needs to happen for AI to take the lead in the US. And the U.S. really needs to lead AI.”