Washington: US President Donald Trump has warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centres could move to China if the United States turns them away, defending their rapid expansion while backing measures intended to prevent the massive facilities from driving up household electricity costs.
Trump made the remarks at a campaign rally in Vandalia, Ohio, Saturday as he sought support for Republican Senator Jon Husted and Indian-American Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
The US President presented data centres as part of the wider technological competition between the United States and China, saying that America needs the computing infrastructure underpinning increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems.
“We want them,” Trump said of the data centres.
“There’s so much money to be made for Ohio. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China.”
Trump said the United States was ahead of China in the technology race and argued against policies that could drive investment in computing infrastructure overseas.
“We’re beating China,” he added.
The remarks came as the growth of data centres has emerged as a contentious issue in Ohio and elsewhere in the United States because of their enormous electricity requirements and concerns about the impact on consumers’ power bills.
Trump said his administration was taking “historic action” to ensure that large technology data centres “benefit local communities”.
He also endorsed the Ratepayer Protection Act pushed by Husted, saying the legislation would prevent data centres from raising electricity costs for other consumers and require the facilities to bear the costs associated with their power requirements.
“I will sign this Ratepayer Protection Act into law immediately,” Trump said.
The legislation has not been enacted. An attempt to advance the measure in the US Senate failed this week.
Large-scale data centres have become increasingly important as technology companies expand the computing capacity required to train and operate artificial intelligence models.
Their growth has also created challenges for utilities because some facilities require enormous amounts of electricity, potentially requiring new generation capacity, transmission infrastructure and substations.
Trump’s comments put the issue within the administration’s broader effort to compete with China in artificial intelligence and what the President has increasingly described as “super intelligence”.
The remarks came a day before the White House announced that the United States and 16 other countries had endorsed the Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science at an international science and technology gathering in Japan.
The declaration calls for expanded access to super-intelligence tools, scientific data, computing infrastructure and experimental facilities to accelerate scientific research.
Trump was in Ohio as part of a campaign push ahead of the midterm elections, where Republicans are seeking to retain control of Congress.
Husted, who was appointed to the US Senate seat vacated when JD Vance became the Vice-President, is seeking election to the seat against former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.
Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants and a former biotechnology entrepreneur who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, is the Republican candidate for Ohio Governor. He is running against Democrat Amy Acton, a physician and former Director of the Ohio Department of Health.
