Donald Trump sat at the centre of a long table in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday 29 September 2026, flanked by the chief executives of Nvidia, Tesla, Meta and Google, and told them the backlash against their data centres would pass. "You're going to see data centers are going to be very popular. They're going to make communities very, very happy," he said, according to Raw Story's account of the lunch. "People have become very rich. Their taxes have gone down, not up." He said that if opposition continued, the projects would "be forced to go overseas or other locations". He said the companies were going to "work with local communities for the data centers in particular, and they're going to work to make the community happy," RSBN reported, and he floated a payment for people who live near them: "you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right."

A longer quotation attributed to Trump, in which he says data centres will be popular "because they're the ones that want it" and that they "want to see communities safe and happy," does not appear in any of the five published accounts of the lunch reviewed for this article, and no White House transcript had been posted by 30 September. The quotations above are the ones two or more outlets reported.

Trump told reporters the executives had agreed to give more financial support to local schools and to reduce energy costs, Reuters reported. The signed text of the accord, which Forbes published, contains no reference to data centres, electricity, schools or taxes. It covers internal safety controls, external auditors and board oversight, and Trump called it "morally binding."

Beverly and Jeff Morris live beside Meta's data centre at Stanton Springs in Newton County, Georgia, east of Atlanta. On 1 September 2026, four weeks before the lunch, they and three other families sued Meta in Gwinnett County, alleging that construction disturbed the aquifer and put silt into their private wells, and that dust, light and noise from the site had damaged their property. Meta said a study it commissioned found "groundwater flows away from the plaintiffs' properties," that its water comes from the public utility and that it would "defend ourselves from baseless lawsuits." No independent hydrogeological review of the wells has been published.

Meta's Newton County site uses about 500,000 gallons of water a day, roughly 10 per cent of the county's daily consumption, The New York Times reported in July 2025. Nine companies had applied to build data centres in the county, some asking for up to 6 million gallons a day, more than the whole county uses. The county is on course for a water deficit by 2030 and projects water rates rising 33 per cent over two years. "What the data centers don't understand is that they're taking up the community wealth," Mike Hopkins, director of the county's water authority, told the Times. "We just don't have the water."

Gallup found in March 2026 that 71 per cent of US adults would oppose a data centre in their area, Al Jazeera reported. A Heatmap and Embold survey of 4,118 registered voters in May 2026 found the same 71 per cent, including 63 per cent of Republicans, against 43 per cent support and 42 per cent opposition in September 2025.

Turbines in Memphis and Southaven

Elon Musk's xAI built its Colossus supercomputer in a former Electrolux factory in south Memphis in 2024 and powered it with gas turbines before it had grid power. Aerial imagery in April 2025 showed about 35 turbines at the site, the Southern Environmental Law Center said, against the 15 for which the Shelby County Health Department later granted a permit in July 2025. The NAACP, the law centre and the local group Young, Gifted and Green appealed the permit on 15 July 2025.

xAI moved its second site, Colossus 2, across the state line to Southaven, Mississippi. Mississippi's Department of Environmental Quality told the company on 29 July 2025 that trailer-mounted turbines there needed no air permit because they were mobile and temporary. The fleet grew from 18 units in August 2025 to 69 by July 2026 without an air permit, Mississippi Today reported, until the state granted a permit for 41 permanent turbines on 10 March 2026. The NAACP sued xAI and its energy subsidiary MZX Tech under the Clean Air Act in April 2026, alleging 27 turbines with a combined 495 megawatts were running without permits and had the "potential to emit over 1,700 tons of smog-forming NOx" a year. The law centre estimated health damages of more than $30 million a year. The allegations have not been tested in court.

The Justice Department moved on 15 June 2026 to intervene on xAI's side and have the suit dismissed. xAI stopped building a promised water recycling plant in April 2026. "We need to focus on finishing Colossus 2... then will build the water recycling plant," Musk wrote, E&E News reported.

The Greater Memphis Chamber marketed xAI's project as a $12 billion investment. The county assessed it on $2.2 billion, and officials "worked with the company to strategically shield equipment" from taxation, the Daily Memphian reported in April 2025. xAI's general manager Brent Mayo said the company took no formal tax abatements and projected 300 permanent staff per site, alongside 1,600 construction workers across both sites. xAI paid $12.5 million in Shelby County property tax for 2025, the Daily Memphian reported, and has donated to four Memphis schools. "xAI has not promoted or really led to the jobs that they said they would," said KeShaun Pearson of Memphis Community Against Pollution. Mississippi exempted xAI's Southaven computing equipment from sales and use tax when the governor announced a $20 billion investment on 8 January 2026.

Permits, loans and a pledge

Trump hosted Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank at the White House on 21 January 2025, the day after taking office, to announce Stargate, a venture promising $100 billion at once and $500 billion by 2029. Bloomberg reported in August 2025 that no money had yet been raised for the joint venture itself.

Executive Order 14318, "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure", signed on 23 July 2025, applies to projects investing at least $500 million or adding more than 100 megawatts of load. It told agencies to find categorical exclusions from the National Environmental Policy Act within 10 days, presumed that federal funding below half a project's cost does not bring it under full federal environmental review, offered fast-track coverage under the FAST-41 statute, opened Interior, Energy and Defense land to development, told the Environmental Protection Agency to write guidance for building on brownfield and Superfund sites, and ordered the Army to review nationwide Clean Water Act permits for data-centre construction within 180 days. It revoked Joe Biden's order on data centres on federal land. The Energy Department selected four of its sites the next day: Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Paducah and Savannah River.

The Army Corps of Engineers added data centres by name to Nationwide Permit 39 in its 2026 reissuance, published on 8 January and in force from 15 March 2026, keeping the half-acre limit on wetland loss and the requirement for advance notice. The EPA launched a Clean Air Act resource page for data centres on 11 December 2025, including guidance on staying below the thresholds that trigger the strictest operating permits and a September 2025 opinion letter allowing construction of non-emitting parts of a facility before an air permit is issued.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright used a rarely invoked section of the Energy Department's founding statute on 23 October 2025 to direct the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to write rules connecting loads above 20 megawatts to the grid faster, with final action by 30 April 2026.

The Energy Department's Loan Programs Office made its first loan under Trump, a $1.6 billion guarantee to American Electric Power, on 20 October 2025. It gave Southern Company's Georgia Power and Alabama Power a $26.5 billion guarantee, the largest in its history, in February 2026, when Southern was citing a 75-gigawatt pipeline of large-load requests. On 8 July 2026 it lent AEP Texas $3.26 billion for about 2,800 miles of transmission to support "potentially 41 gigawatts of new load through 2030, largely from data centers."

The Energy Department issued 49 emergency orders under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act between January and September 2026, its own register shows, keeping coal and gas plants in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Washington, Indiana and Florida running past planned retirement. The orders cite grid reliability. Keeping the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan open has a net cost of $135 million through December 2026, and Grid Strategies estimated $3 billion to $6 billion a year across the plants covered, Stateline reported.

Trump wrote on Truth Social on 13 January 2026: "I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers," The Register reported. On 4 March he announced the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI, who committed to "build, bring, or buy" new generation, pay for grid upgrades and pay agreed rates whatever they actually use. The fact sheet said: "prices will not go up, but in many cases, will actually come down." The pledge and its proclamation contain no enforcement mechanism and no penalty. Residential electricity rates are set by state utility commissions, not the federal government, and 75 per cent of adults told Consumer Reports they doubted developers would absorb the costs, The Next Web reported.

Trump's executive order of 11 December 2025 on preempting state AI laws exempted "AI compute and data center infrastructure" from the preemption it proposed, leaving siting and moratoria to states and towns. On 19 August he said: "If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous." On 31 August he wrote that communities should not want data centres only "if they want to end up being backwards and poor," Al Jazeera reported, adding: "If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign."

Donations, dinners and pledges

Trump hosted technology leaders at a White House dinner on 4 September 2025 and told them: "We're making it very easy for you in terms of electric capacity… getting your permits." Mark Zuckerberg said at the dinner that Meta would spend "at least $600 billion through 2028" in the United States. At the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on 15 July 2025, which Trump attended, companies announced more than $90 billion across about 20 projects.

Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and Altman each gave at least $1 million to Trump's inauguration, Bloomberg and others reported. NextEra Energy gave $1 million, E&E News reported; in July 2026 Brookfield and NextEra were chosen for the Paducah site, a 1.8-gigawatt campus with 2 gigawatts of gas generation and more than $100 billion of planned spending, through a competitive solicitation. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, the owner of the data-centre developer QTS, is on the published list of donors to Trump's White House ballroom, alongside Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft; the amounts were not released. Greg Brockman of OpenAI and his wife Anna gave $25 million to Trump's super PAC MAGA Inc in the second half of 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Ellison gave about $45 million to an undisclosed nonprofit backing Trump's 2024 campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported; Oracle did not comment.

NextEra's donation came 18 months before the Paducah selection, Blackstone's summit pledge a week before the permitting order, and the Brockman gifts while OpenAI's Stargate sites were seeking power and permits. None of the documents reviewed shows that any of these decisions was made because of a donation. The Energy Department sites were chosen through requests for information and solicitations, the loans through formal applications, and the emergency orders on stated reliability grounds.

About $835 billion a year

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have guided to between $720 billion and $745 billion of capital spending in 2026, rising to about $835 billion with Oracle's fiscal 2027 plan, TMT Finance calculated in August. Amazon raised its 2026 forecast to about $220 billion, and its chief executive Andy Jassy said the company would not "have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026." Alphabet raised its range to $195 billion to $205 billion. Meta narrowed its guidance to $130 billion to $145 billion and reported free cash flow of $784 million for the second quarter, on revenue of $60.8 billion. Microsoft lowered its calendar 2026 figure from about $190 billion to about $175 billion through an accounting change, saying physical spending plans were unchanged.

Nvidia reported second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion on 26 August 2026, its securities filing shows, of which $89.0 billion came from data centres, with net income of $59.7 billion in the quarter and a gross margin of 75 per cent. "Now, compute is revenue. And demand is accelerating," Jensen Huang said. Nvidia has recycled part of the money into its own customers: it took a $30 billion equity stake in OpenAI after a September 2025 plan for up to $100 billion never became a contract, and holds a stake in CoreWeave worth about $4.4 billion alongside a $6.3 billion agreement to buy CoreWeave's capacity, The Next Web reported.

GE Vernova had 116 gigawatts of gas turbines under contract in July 2026 and a total backlog of $176 billion, and said its data-centre orders were "over $5 billion year-to-date, more than double our 2025 total."

Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is financed off Meta's balance sheet: it is owned by Beignet Investor LLC, 80 per cent held by Blue Owl Capital and 20 per cent by Meta, which sold $27.3 billion of bonds against Meta's lease payments. Meta leases the campus in four-year blocks and gives a residual value guarantee covering 16 years. "If Meta is really wearing the risk, it is curious that Meta does not consolidate it," IFR's analysis said. BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, the Abu Dhabi fund MGX and the AI Infrastructure Partnership, whose partners include Microsoft and Nvidia, completed a $40 billion purchase of Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie on 22 July 2026. Data-centre financing through debt markets reached $125 billion in 2025, against $15 billion in 2024, UBS estimated. "The risks are more like equity than debt," said Al Cattermole of Mirabaud.

Oracle's free cash flow was negative $23.7 billion in the year to 31 May 2026, and S&P Global cut its rating to BBB-, one notch above junk, on 9 July, writing that "we underestimated the scale of the investments required" and that OpenAI accounts for about half of Oracle's $638 billion in contracted future revenue. CoreWeave paid $640 million in net interest in the second quarter of 2026, five times its adjusted operating income of $128 million, and its founders have sold $2.3 billion of stock since the March 2025 flotation. Crusoe, the developer of OpenAI's Stargate site in Abilene, Texas, raised more than $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation on 3 September 2026.

AEP raised its five-year plan to $78 billion with 63 gigawatts of new load contracted by 2030. Southern Company's plan for 2026 to 2030 rose to $81 billion. Dominion Energy reported more than 53 gigawatts of data-centre demand at some stage of contracting and in May agreed to merge with NextEra.

Bain & Company estimated in September 2025 that the industry needs $2 trillion of annual revenue by 2030 to justify the spending and faces a shortfall of $800 billion.

Eric Trump's bitcoin miner and the Anthropic lease

Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump launched American Data Centers Inc. on 21 February 2025 with Dominari Holdings, which held 32 per cent. "The establishment of ADC is crucial for the development of AI infrastructure in the United States," Eric Trump said. In March 2025 the company was merged with the bitcoin-mining assets of Hut 8 Corp and renamed American Bitcoin, with Hut 8 taking 80 per cent and the Trumps and other American Data Centers shareholders 20 per cent, Fortune reported. American Bitcoin listed on Nasdaq on 3 September 2025 by merging with Gryphon Digital Mining.

Eric Trump holds 68,147,664 Class B shares of American Bitcoin, equal to 7.5 per cent of the Class A stock on a fully diluted basis, according to a Schedule 13D filed on 10 September 2025. Each Class B share carries 10,000 votes. No filing showing Donald Trump Jr's holding was found. Its second-quarter 2026 results reported revenue of $67.0 million, a net loss of $57.2 million and 8,002 bitcoin held, and made no mention of AI or high-performance computing; the company mines bitcoin.

Hut 8, American Bitcoin's majority owner, has moved into AI data centres. On 17 December 2025 it signed a 15-year lease of 245 megawatts at its River Bend campus in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, to Fluidstack, which runs computing for Anthropic, worth $7 billion over the base term and about $17.7 billion with renewals. Google backstops the lease payments for the full base term, and JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are lending up to 85 per cent of the construction cost, The Block reported. In May 2026 Hut 8 signed a second lease of 352 megawatts at Beacon Point in Nueces County, Texas, worth $9.8 billion, with an unnamed investment-grade tenant; AEP Texas provides the grid connection. Two months later AEP Texas received the Energy Department's $3.26 billion transmission loan. No document reviewed links the loan to Hut 8's site, and no evidence was found that the Trumps hold Hut 8 shares directly.

Trump's revocable trust holds 114,750,000 shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, his 2025 financial disclosure shows. Trump Media agreed on 18 December 2025 to merge with the fusion developer TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal valued at more than $6 billion, pitched as a way to "help America win the A.I. revolution" through a power business serving "A.I. data centers." Devin Nunes, Trump Media's chief executive, said fusion would "ensure America's A.I.-supremacy." In June 2026 the companies pushed the closing to the fourth quarter with the registration statement still unfiled. The American Nuclear Society's news service wrote that the deal was "likely to draw scrutiny for possible conflicts of interest."

Trump bought at least $51 million of bonds in March 2026 in 175 transactions, including corporate debt of Constellation Energy, Broadcom, Nvidia, Meta and Microsoft, Reuters reported from his periodic transaction reports. More than 3,500 trades were disclosed for the first quarter, including purchases of Nvidia, Oracle and Microsoft shares, Axios reported. A White House spokesperson said in August that "neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested."

Donald Trump Jr sits on the investment committee of a $1.2 billion real estate fund closed by 1789 Capital in August 2026, which targets Sun Belt housing, manufacturing and "digital infrastructure like data centers"; about 40 per cent of the firm's capital comes from foreign investors. 1789's growth fund holds stakes in xAI and SpaceX. Representative Jamie Raskin opened an inquiry on 27 August 2026 into whether 1789 portfolio companies Vulcan Elements, Anduril, Juul and Polymarket received favourable federal treatment.

Trump's policies on permits, power and grid connection apply to the whole industry, including Hut 8's campuses and any power business Trump Media acquires. No federal action taken specifically for American Bitcoin, Hut 8, TAE or a 1789 data-centre asset was found.

434 million gallons in The Dalles

US data centres consumed about 17 billion gallons of water directly for cooling in 2023, and about 211 billion gallons more through the power stations that supplied them, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated in December 2024; it said direct use could double or quadruple by 2028. Google consumed 7.2 billion gallons of freshwater in 2024 and replenished about 64 per cent, Axios reported. Google pledged in June 2026 to return more water than its data centres consume by 2030. About two-thirds of its data centres use evaporative cooling.

Google's data centres in The Dalles, Oregon, used 104 million gallons in 2012, 434 million in 2024 and about 550 million in 2025, some 40 per cent of the city's water, city records obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting show. The city sued The Oregonian on Google's behalf to keep the figures secret as trade secrets and dropped the suit after 13 months, in December 2022.

Amazon Web Services, the Port of Morrow, the potato processor Lamb Weston, two large farms, Portland General Electric and a food processor agreed on 31 March 2026 to pay $20.5 million to settle a class action brought by residents of Morrow and Umatilla counties in eastern Oregon, whose wells are contaminated with nitrates. The suit alleged that Amazon's data centres discharge "tens of millions of gallons of water annually" of cooling water that "accelerates the movement of existing nitrates" into the aquifer. Amazon "denies each and every one of the allegations," and a spokesperson said: "we don't add nitrates." The settlement admits no liability.

Arizona's data centres used about 10,200 acre-feet of water in 2025, Bluefield Research estimated, and the Phoenix area could need nearly 56,000 acre-feet a year if all planned sites open, the Arizona Republic reported. Andy Masley, an environmentalist who writes on AI, put Maricopa County's data centres at 905 million gallons a year, 0.12 per cent of county water use, against 29 billion gallons for golf courses. Texas data centres use about 25 billion gallons a year and could use up to 161 billion by 2030, the Houston Advanced Research Center estimated in January 2026, while the draft 2027 state water plan projects no data-centre demand.

QTS's 600-acre campus in Fayetteville, Georgia, drew 109 million gallons through 13 water lines during construction from February 2024, county records show. The county first said two lines had been installed "without the knowledge or inspection" of its staff, then retracted that and blamed a meter upgrade. QTS says the site will use 9,000 to 12,000 gallons a month once its closed-loop cooling runs from about 2030.

$23.1 billion on other customers' bills

Data centres used 176 terawatt-hours in 2023, 4.4 per cent of US electricity, and could use 6.7 to 12 per cent by 2028, the Energy Department reported. Consumer electricity prices rose 4.0 per cent in the 12 months to June 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, and the Energy Information Administration forecast an average residential price of 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, up nearly 5 per cent, linking rising commercial demand to data centres.

PJM Interconnection, which runs the grid for 13 states and Washington DC including northern Virginia, cleared its capacity auction for 2027 and 2028 at the price cap of $333.44 per megawatt-day in December 2025 and still fell 6,623 megawatts short of its reliability requirement; data centres accounted for 5,100 megawatts of a 5,250-megawatt rise in forecast peak load, Renewable Energy World reported. PJM's independent market monitor wrote that "the total increase in costs to other PJM customers as a result of data center load in the last three BRAs was $23,100,955,341."

Virginia's State Corporation Commission raised Dominion residential bills by $11.24 a month in 2026 and $2.36 more in 2027 on 26 November 2025, with an allowed return on equity of 9.8 per cent, and created a large-load class from 2027 in which data centres must pay for at least 85 per cent of contracted transmission and distribution demand. Virginia's legislative audit commission projected in December 2024 that a typical residential customer's generation and transmission costs could rise by $14 to $37 a month in real terms by 2040, and also found that data centres "currently… pay the full cost of their energy service." Dominion is seeking $922 million for the Valley Link transmission lines, nearly 400 miles of 765-kilovolt line, about $8 a month per customer. "Data centers should pay for the backbone, the infrastructure, the transmission that they require," Governor Abigail Spanberger said.

Georgia's Public Service Commission certified 9,885 megawatts of new Georgia Power capacity by five votes to nothing on 19 December 2025, saying the deal puts "$8.50 per month downward pressure" on bills and freezes base rates to 2028. The chairman, Jason Shaw, said the agreement "ensures data centers" would pay, "or, if necessary, Georgia Power itself." PIRG, which said most of the capacity was gas, estimated initial costs of $3.4 billion and $50 billion to $60 billion over the plants' lives. Two Democrats who campaigned on power bills, Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard, had defeated two Republican commissioners with more than 62 per cent each on 4 November 2025; they dissented when the commission refused to reconsider on 18 February 2026.

Entergy Louisiana has asked to build seven more gas plants for Meta's Hyperion campus, bringing the total to 10 plants and about 7.5 gigawatts, The Lens reported. Meta pays minimum charges covering capital costs for 20 years, while fuel and operating costs are spread across Entergy's customers. "Ratepayers seem to bear 100% of the financial risk" if Meta leaves early, expert testimony cited by the Union of Concerned Scientists found. An administrative law judge ordered Meta on 4 August 2026 to disclose its investment, permanent job numbers and demand projections, and the Louisiana commission voted three to one on 12 August to quash the subpoena. A final decision is due on 16 December 2026.

Lawrence Berkeley researchers found in November 2025 that states with the highest load growth between 2019 and 2024 had lower real average retail prices, with a smaller and statistically insignificant effect on residential prices; they wrote: "Whether these historical relationships extend to a future of significant, nationwide load growth is unclear." Michigan's Public Service Commission says DTE Energy's contracts for the 1.4-gigawatt Stargate campus in Saline Township will save other customers $300 million a year; Attorney General Dana Nessel is appealing the approval, which was granted without a contested hearing.

9,000 diesel generators in Virginia

Virginia's data centres have about 9,000 diesel backup generators, 4,700 of them in Loudoun County, the Virginia Mercury reported. A Department of Environmental Quality memo of 30 September 2025 proposed widening the definition of an emergency to let them run during planned utility outages; in the worst case they could emit 9,000 tons of nitrogen oxides a year, about half of northern Virginia's total from all sources. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Caltech estimated that data-centre air pollution caused $6.7 billion in US health costs in 2023 and could cause $11.7 billion to $20.9 billion a year by 2028, with about 1,300 premature deaths.

Google's emissions were 51 per cent above 2019 levels in 2024, and a summary of its 2026 report showed a further 18 per cent rise as its electricity demand grew 37 per cent. Microsoft's emissions rose 25 per cent in fiscal 2025 to 20.3 million tonnes after it paused purchases of unbundled renewable certificates. Of 378 gigawatts of gas capacity in development in the United States, 189 gigawatts is linked to data centres, Global Energy Monitor found in August 2026, double the figure at the end of 2025. The Stargate site in Abilene burns gas under a permit for 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases a year.

Wetlands, battlefields and backyards

E&E News reviewed 95 data-centre projects and found in July 2026 that only 26 needed individual wetland permits with public comment; at least 26 used nationwide permits in sensitive waters and at least 27 proceeded with no federal permit. Examples included 63 acres or more of wetlands and streams exempted in north Texas, 27 acres of streams in Reno and Nscale's 1,200-acre campus in Mason County, West Virginia. Google applied in April 2026 for an individual permit to fill nearly 17 acres of wetlands and affect more than 6,000 feet of streams at a site near Little Rock, Arkansas. Meta's Hyperion campus has grown from 2,250 acres of farmland to 3,650 acres, with a 100-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line approved in 2025.

Prince William County's board rezoned 1,790 acres beside Manassas National Battlefield Park and the Occoquan watershed for the PW Digital Gateway, 37 data-centre buildings for QTS and Compass, after a 27-hour meeting in December 2023. Circuit Judge Kimberly Irving voided the rezoning in August 2025 because the county had not given proper public notice, the Court of Appeals affirmed, the county spent $1.7 million defending the approvals and QTS withdrew on 2 July 2026, ending the project. The plaintiffs included the American Battlefield Trust. "The process was broken, and the law was violated," said Mac Haddow, president of the Oak Valley homeowners' association.

Four Amazon data centres sit about 400 feet from backyards in Great Oak, a Prince William subdivision where residents began complaining of noise in spring 2022. County monitoring from January 2023 to March 2025 recorded tonal low-frequency noise at 70, 112, 129 and 177 hertz, and the county said its limits for the area had "to come down by up to 9 decibels". Carlos Yanes said his seven-year-old "says he thinks there is a hair dryer right on your ear."

50 jobs, $928 million

A typical Virginia data centre employs about 50 people, the state's audit commission found, and Virginia's sales-tax exemption for data-centre equipment cost $928 million in fiscal 2023 and returned 48 cents in economic benefit per dollar. Data centres took 53 per cent of Virginia's economic development incentive spending from 2015 to 2024, a later audit found. Good Jobs First put the fiscal 2025 cost at $1.6 billion. "Like 35 other states, Virginia is losing control of its spending by enacting virtually automatic sales and use tax exemptions," said Greg LeRoy, its director. Virginia's June 2026 budget kept the exemption to 2035 and added an electricity tax of 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Loudoun County, the largest data-centre market in the world, received 31 per cent of its local tax revenue from data centres in fiscal 2023, and its board said its fiscal 2027 budget gives "an overall net tax reduction for most Loudoun home and vehicle owners." Texas forgoes more than $1 billion a year in data-centre sales tax against an initial estimate of $130 million, Georgia $625 million and Illinois $370 million, Bloomberg Law reported. Meta's El Paso site receives about $110 million in abatements for about 100 expected jobs, 50 of them required, and the Abilene Stargate site an 85 per cent property tax break for 357 permanent jobs against about 1,500 construction workers.

Richland Parish's tax receipts reached $30 million over three years against $22 million in total the year before Meta arrived, and a rental that cost $600 to $700 a month now costs $2,500, the parish assessor said.

Pima County's former procurement director Teri Spencer signed a nondisclosure agreement naming Amazon Web Services that runs from March 2023 to March 2028 and gives Amazon 10 days' notice of public records requests. The project, Project Blue, was developed by Beale Infrastructure, owned by Blue Owl, with Amazon reported as the intended user. Tucson's council rejected it unanimously on 6 August 2025. "It was uncomfortable to have more information than the community but not be able to talk about it," said the councillor Nikki Lee. Beale moved the project to 290 acres of unincorporated county land with air cooling. In December 2025 Amazon withdrew as the intended tenant and the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the power deal by four votes to one, and construction began in April 2026.

Five Wisconsin communities, Beaver Dam, Kenosha, Janesville, Menomonie and the Town of Beloit, signed nondisclosure agreements with developers, Wisconsin Watch found; the mayor of Menomonie, Randy Knaack, lost his seat to an opponent of the project. Farmington, Minnesota's community development director Deanna Kuennen signed one with the developer Tract and asked Tract how to "offset the opposition," the Star Tribune reported. Tucson and Pima County have limited new agreements to two years with disclosure 90 days before a vote, and Port Washington, Wisconsin, signed none for its $15 billion Vantage campus for OpenAI and Oracle, where voters then required a referendum on future tax-increment deals above $10 million by two to one on 8 April 2026.

Saline Township, Michigan, voted four to one on 10 September 2025 against rezoning 575 acres for Related Digital's Stargate campus. Related sued, alleging exclusionary zoning, and the township settled within weeks for $14 million in community payments and a 55-decibel noise cap. The township clerk, Kelly Marion, said she felt intimidated by the lawsuit, Yahoo Finance reported. Hood County, Texas, commissioners rejected a moratorium by three votes to two on 10 February 2026 after the Republican state senator Paul Bettencourt wrote that counties lacked the authority to impose one; Commissioner Dave Eagle called his letter "a threat letter." Data Center Watch counted 75 projects worth about $130 billion blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 and 833 local opposition groups.

Lobbyists, front groups and a regulator's new job

The Data Center Coalition spent more than $2.5 million lobbying in 2023, gave $50,000 to leadership PACs of the Virginia House speaker and other legislators and set up a nonprofit, Virginia Connects, that spent about $700,000 in fiscal 2024, Tech Policy Press reported. Delegate Luke Torian raised more than $590,000 in 2023, including $270,000 from Dominion and $41,000 from the Digital Gateway landowner Mary Ann Ghadban, the Prince William Times reported. As chairman of House Finance in April 2026 he opposed ending the sales-tax exemption early, saying "existing [memorandums of understanding] that have been signed… we should honor those," and the final budget kept it. No evidence links the donations to his position.

Georgia's Senate adjourned on 26 February 2026 without voting on SB 34, a bill by the Republican senator Chuck Hufstetler to stop data-centre costs reaching residential bills, when his amendment appeared to have majority support, the Georgia Recorder reported. "Eighty percent of the people in Georgia want this," Hufstetler said. "If they had the votes, they wouldn't have to adjourn," said Harold Jones, the Democratic leader. Khara Boender of the Data Center Coalition said the bill "would have… signaled that Georgia is closed for business."

Tricia Pridemore, a Republican member of Georgia's Public Service Commission since 2018 who voted on data-centre cost rules and on Georgia Power expansions driven by data-centre demand, resigned on 4 September 2026 and became executive vice-president for energy, regulatory and policy at the data-centre builder DC BLOX. She said her first year would focus on federal projects and neighbouring states; Georgia bars lobbying for a year after leaving office. "Public policies fundamentally rest on people's trust in the system," said Edward Queen of Emory University's Center for Ethics. Prologis's director of data-centre policy, Trae Westmoreland, previously worked at Coweta County's development authority, DeSmog reported; the county rezoned the 830-acre Project Sail site by three votes to two on 7 April 2026.

Windwave, Middenmeer and Johor

Two former Port of Morrow commissioners, Marv Padberg and Jerry Healy, and a former Morrow County commissioner, Don Russell, each agreed to pay $2,000 to Oregon's Government Ethics Commission in 2024 after it found they had voted on Amazon tax breaks and land sales while each held 20 per cent of Windwave Communications, a fibre company serving Amazon. The commission counted 14 Windwave contracts with Amazon from 2018 to 2022 and valued each official's benefit at no less than $250,000; Amazon's tax breaks there since 2018 totalled $245 million. The three denied wrongdoing and said they settled "because we no longer wished to use time, resources and energy on these issues." Kate Titus of Common Cause Oregon called the penalty "a slap on the wrist."

Oregon's Attorney General Dan Rayfield sued the three, the former port director Gary Neal and the Republican state representative Greg Smith on 15 July 2025, alleging they arranged an insider purchase of Windwave from a public-benefit nonprofit for $2.6 million in 2018, a year in which it earned $1.5 million in profit, by giving valuers outdated figures. The state seeks at least $6.9 million or to void the sale. "When public officials use their positions to game the system for private gain, it's a betrayal of trust," Rayfield said. Amazon paid Windwave more than $100 million in the four years after the sale, the Anchorage Daily News reported; Amazon said: "We set a high bar for ourselves and our suppliers." A judge let the case proceed on 4 March 2026; the defendants say they meant to keep Windwave locally owned and that the state approved the sale. Smith, who denies the state's allegation that he helped devise a concealment strategy, signed a separate $12,000 ethics settlement on 16 July 2026 over his job at the Columbia Development Authority, without admitting intentional violations.

Britain's Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation on 30 April 2025 in which, it said, "Blu-3 and others are suspected of paying over £3 million of bribes to associates of Mace Group" in connection with the construction of a data centre in the Netherlands for Microsoft. Three people were arrested and five properties searched; the site is Microsoft's Middenmeer campus, Data Center Dynamics reported. Microsoft is not a suspect. The case remains open and no charges have been announced. Malaysia's Anti-Corruption Commission remanded four people in July 2025 over about RM7.5 million in suspected kickbacks for six tenders on an RM180 million data-centre project in Johor; Sunway Construction said one of its employees was under investigation and that it was "fully cooperative with the MACC."

Pete Candland, a Prince William supervisor who had agreed to sell his home to the Digital Gateway developers, resigned in December 2022 after legal advice that he had a conflict; state police later found "no violations" in his consulting for developers after he left office. In Marana, Arizona, the council rezoned 600 acres for a $5 billion project on land owned in part by the family trust of the council member Herb Kai; whether he recused himself was not established.

$6.3 million an acre

SDC Capital Partners paid $6.3 million an acre for 97 acres in Loudoun County in 2025, where the median price was $125,000 an acre, and Amazon paid about $3.75 million an acre for 189 acres in Prince William, the National Association of Home Builders compiled. In Taylor, Texas, about 88 acres the Bland family donated for $10 in 1999 for parkland passed to the city, which sold it to its economic development corporation for $15,000 in 2008; the corporation sold it to the developer Blueprint in 2025 for $10 million, and the family is suing.

Coweta County's Project Sail was filed by Atlas Development LLC, run by Jonathon Ward and backed by Prologis, whose application cited $17 billion while Prologis's own analysis projected $112 billion over 21 years, DeSmog reported. Amazon bought about 1,000 acres in Lamar County, Georgia, for $270 million through Amazon Data Services. Hyperion runs from Richland Parish to Beignet Investor LLC, to Blue Owl and Meta, to Blue Owl's investors and Meta's shareholders. No purchase through a company traced to a politically connected buyer ahead of an announcement was documented.

Afula, Idan HaNegev and EdgeConneX

Crusoe plans to invest $10 billion in Israeli data centres over 10 to 15 years, Globes reported on 28 June 2026, with about 150 megawatts at sites in the Idan HaNegev industrial park, Haifa and a facility owned by Anan Group, and 45,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin processors. Anan Group is owned by the singer Omer Adam, Maor Melul and Nessim-Sariel Gaon, and the partner MegaDC by Zahi Nahmias. Crusoe had signed a 40-megawatt lease at Anan's site in Afula worth about NIS 3 billion over a decade in April. "We intend to bring Nvidia's newest processors, Vera Rubin, with the aim of making Israel one of Crusoe's biggest markets in the world," said Alon Yariv, Crusoe's country manager. Crusoe is a US company that builds the Abilene site for Oracle and OpenAI.

Israeli institutions Migdal, More, Meitav and Clal put $1.03 billion into EdgeConneX, a data-centre operator owned by Sweden's EQT, in July 2026. Nvidia plans about $1.5 billion for a campus at Kiryat Tivon with a potential 100-megawatt data centre, and employs more than 5,000 people in Israel. The documents show commercial investment by Israeli and US firms in each other's markets; no evidence was found of state co-ordination with Trump administration data-centre policy, and nationality is not treated here as evidence of anything.

BitRiver and Oleg Deripaska

The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned BitRiver, Russia's largest crypto-mining host, and 10 subsidiaries on 20 April 2022, saying "Russia has a comparative advantage in crypto mining due to energy resources and a cold climate." A subsidiary of En+, the power and aluminium group of which Oleg Deripaska is a part-owner, started bankruptcy proceedings against BitRiver's parent over about 700 million roubles for undelivered equipment; Deripaska's link is as part-owner of a creditor. A search of reporting on Hut 8 and American Bitcoin found no Russian connection, and no Russian or sanctioned capital was traced into companies, investors, land or infrastructure in the current US build-out. The search was not exhaustive.

Threats and deaths

A crowd in McCormick County, South Carolina, moved towards the dais after a three-to-two vote on 10 September 2026 to rezone about 1,000 acres, deputies intervened and councillors left by a back door; no arrests were reported. Recalls targeted 329 officials in the first half of 2026, the highest midyear count since 2014, Newsweek reported, several over data centres. A Coweta commissioner, John Reidelbach, asked for a reprimand of a state biologist, Katie O'Shields, who opposed Project Sail. No death of a journalist, activist, official, whistleblower or landowner credibly connected to a data-centre dispute was found, and none is reported here.

Who has been paid

Nvidia's net income for the three months to July, $59.7 billion, was 37 times the annual cost of Virginia's data-centre sales-tax exemption and two and a half times the $23.1 billion in capacity costs that PJM's market monitor attributes to data-centre load across three auctions. Permanent employment runs from about 50 at a typical Virginia site to a projected 300 at each xAI site and 357 at Abilene, and landowners in northern Virginia have sold at 40 to 50 times the county median price per acre.

Loudoun County's residents have had net tax reductions, and Virginia's auditors found data centres currently pay the full cost of their power. Lawrence Berkeley researchers found that high load growth has coincided with lower average prices. Georgia's and Michigan's regulators say their data-centre contracts will lower other customers' bills. Masley's figures put the Phoenix area's data-centre water use below that of its golf courses. Memphis's air tests found no dangerous pollutant levels. Amazon denies the Morrow County allegations, Meta disputes the Newton County lawsuit and no finding of bribery has been made against any US data-centre operator.

Google has not published an absolute figure for its 2025 water consumption. The Louisiana commission has kept Meta's demand projections and job numbers from the public. No independent test of the Morris family's wells has been published. No filing shows the size of Donald Trump Jr's stake in American Bitcoin, or whether either son has sold shares. Hut 8 has not named the tenant at Beacon Point. No national count of municipal nondisclosure agreements exists, and the Serious Fraud Office has announced no charges in the Middenmeer inquiry. Louisiana's Public Service Commission is due to decide on Entergy's seven additional gas plants for Meta on 16 December 2026.