President-elect Donald Trump announced that Hussein Sajwani, the Emirati billionaire businessman who founded real estate 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 news conference Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago home. The data center mainly supports AI and cloud technology.
“We have been waiting for years to increase our investment in the United States,” Sajwani said. “We are looking to invest $20 billion, [potentially] More than that. ”
Details regarding the investment were not disclosed at the press conference.
It is important to note that this transaction may not be of any use. Similar investment promises have fizzled 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. The semiconductor giant has created about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin by the end of 2022, but is far short of the 13,000 it promised and will not have spent as of early 2023, Wisconsin Public Radio reported. It was said that it was only $1 billion.
President Trump has been a vocal critic of the CHIPS Act, one of the signature policy achievements of the outgoing Biden administration. The law provides $39 billion in subsidies, plus a 25% tax credit and billions more to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry, where production has been shifted to Asia for decades. Secured financing.
Trump and other Republicans, including Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who was narrowly re-elected as speaker of the House 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 of 2022, passed with bipartisan support, attracted investment from all five of the world's top advanced chipmakers. According to Bloomberg, companies have committed to spending more than 10 times the total amount of subsidies in the law.
Many technology leaders are calling on the United States to increase investment in data center infrastructure, especially as the AI industry continues to grow at an explosive pace. Developing and running AI systems at scale requires enormous computing resources.
Microsoft recently announced that it plans to spend $80 billion on AI data centers, but President Brad Smith said in a recent blog post that the company's success is due to “new partnerships built on massive infrastructure investments.” He said that it depends on.
“The United States is poised to be at the forefront of this new technology wave, especially if we build on our strengths and partner effectively internationally,” Smith wrote. “The next government can strengthen [its] It is building on the foundational elements of President Trump's efforts during his first term. ”
In an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the Trump administration has a “real opportunity to do better.” [than the CHIPS Act] As a sequel. ”
“I don't think the CHIP Act was as effective as any of us expected,” Altman said. “What I really and deeply agree with is that [President Trump] That's how difficult it has become to make things in the United States. Power plants, data centers, things like that. I understand how bureaucratic corruption accumulates, but it doesn't help the country as a whole. ”