President-elect Donald Trump has announced that Hussain Sajwani, an Emirati billionaire businessman who founded the 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 during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home on Tuesday. The data centers will primarily support AI and cloud technologies.
“We’ve been waiting for years to increase our investments in the U.S.,” Sajwani said. “We’re trying to invest $20 billion, and [potentially] even more than that.”
No further details about the investment were disclosed during the press conference.
It’s important to note that the deal may amount to nothing. Similar investment pledges have fizzled out in the past.
In 2017, then-President Trump and Wisconsin’s then-governor Scott Walker announced that Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn would spend $10 billion for 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 created about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin — far from the 13,000 it promised — and spent only $1 billion as of the beginning of 2023.
Trump has been a vocal critic of the CHIPS Act, one of the signature policy achievements of the outgoing Biden Administration. The Act set aside $39 billion in grants, plus 25% tax credits and billions more in loans, to rejuvenate American semiconductor manufacturing after decades of production shifting to Asia.
Trump and other Republicans, including Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was narrowly reelected 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 with bipartisan support in 2022, attracted investment from all five of the world’s top advanced chipmakers. Companies have pledged to spend more than ten-times the Act’s grant total, according to Bloomberg.
A number of tech leaders have called for the U.S. to up its investment in data centers infrastructure, particularly as the AI industry continues to grow at an explosive pace. AI systems require enormous computing infrastructure to develop and run at scale.
Microsoft, which recently said it was on track to spend $80 billion on AI data centers, said in a recent blog post penned by president Brad Smith that the company’s success depends on “new partnerships founded on large-scale infrastructure investments.”
“The United States is poised to stand at the forefront of this new technology wave, especially if it doubles down on its strengths and effectively partners internationally,” Smith wrote. “The incoming Administration can strengthen [its] foundational elements, building on the work from President Trump’s first term.”
In an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that there’s “a real opportunity” for the Trump Administration to “to do something much better [than the CHIPS Act] as a follow-on.”
“I don’t think the Chips Act has been as effective as any of us hoped,” Altman said. “The thing I really deeply agree with [President Trump] on is, it is wild how difficult it has become to build things in the United States. Power plants, data centers, any of that kind of stuff. I understand how bureaucratic cruft builds up, but it’s not helpful to the country in general. It’s particularly not helpful when you think about what needs to happen for the U.S. to lead AI. And the U.S. really needs to lead AI.”
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