President Donald Trump has escalated his defence of artificial intelligence infrastructure by telling Americans who oppose new data centers that their protests are delivering a victory to Beijing, as a wave of bipartisan resistance reshapes the political landscape ahead of November's midterm elections.

Trump Takes to Truth Social With a Warning

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump told communities rejecting the vast computing warehouses that underpin the AI industry that they must want to end up "backwards and poor" and called on the country to "let Data Reign".

The president warned that Americans "will only have themselves to blame" if the projects are killed off, and said China "could not be happier with this anti-data center movement. "

The post went further than Trump's usual framing around jobs and tax revenue. He has been building toward this argument for weeks, using the same China line as the previous week in an interview with Michael Cohen, his former fixer, in which he insisted the United States led in artificial intelligence "by a lot".

Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the White House next month.

Polling Shows the Public Is Not Convinced

The political ground Trump is trying to hold appears shaky. A national survey conducted earlier in August found 61 percent of Americans opposed a data center being built in their own community, a figure that included 47 percent of Republicans.

On Trump's central claim that towns without data centers will be economically left behind, 51 percent of respondents said they disagreed with him.

The resistance is already producing concrete results. The research group Data Center Watch counted at least 75 projects worth roughly USD 130 billion that were blocked or delayed by local campaigns in the first three months of 2026 alone.

Communities in Monterey Park in California, Prince William County in Virginia, and Wake County in North Carolina have all mounted campaigns against proposed facilities and prevailed.

Residents Cite Power Bills and Water Use, Not Ideology

The complaints driving local opposition tend to be practical rather than ideological.

Residents point to rising utility bills, groundwater consumption in drought-affected states, persistent low-frequency noise, and agricultural land being converted into windowless server sheds. In New Mexico, an environmental group has challenged well-drilling permits connected to Project Jupiter, a USD 65 billion complex planned near the Mexican border involving Oracle and OpenAI.

The scale of investment nationally is substantial: Oracle, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft together expect to put more than USD 700 billion into United States data centers this year alone.

Vice President JD Vance, speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday, put a specific framing on the opposition.

Nearly all of the backlash, he said, comes from places where a new data center means a higher power bill for people living nearby. His proposed remedy is that operators should be adding electricity to the grid rather than drawing it out.

Republicans in Competitive Races Are Breaking With the White House

The political fractures are most visible among Republicans facing difficult contests.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott spent a year actively promoting data center development before ordering regulators to hold approvals pending audits, and has since promised action against the state's billion-dollar-plus annual tax break for the industry.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year ban on large data center projects in July. Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers and Stacy Garrity, who is running for governor in Pennsylvania, have both called for temporary halts on new construction.

Ohio and Wisconsin Emerge as Flashpoints

The sharpest electoral test is taking shape in Ohio, where Sherrod Brown has spent millions on advertising that brands Senator Jon Husted as the face of the data center industry in the state. A Republican Senate campaign memo has described the issue as the anchor around Husted's neck.

In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany is running an advertisement that renames his Democratic opponent "Data Center David Crowley".

Crowley has since stated that no community should be forced to accept a project it does not want.

The confrontation has moved from local zoning disputes to the center of a national midterm argument, with Trump betting that the case for beating China in artificial intelligence will outrank the argument about the monthly power bill. Whether that calculation holds will become clear in November.