Big data and big money are overlapping ahead of President-elect Donald Trump‘s inauguration later this month.
Trump announced Tuesday that Hussain Sajwani, CEO of DAMAC Properties and a United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based billionaire, will invest $20 billion into building and powering U.S. data centers, to help proliferate the development of artificial intelligence.
“The investment will support massive new data centers across the Midwest, the Sun Belt area, and also to keep America on the cutting edge of technology and artificial intelligence,” Trump said during a press conference with Sajwani at Mar-a-Lago.
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According to Trump, the funds from Sajwani will initially be allocated to building or upgrading data centers in Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. The president-elect emphasized the importance of the U.S. maintaining a competitive position in the growing AI market.
The announcement comes just weeks after Trump announced that SoftBank Group, a Japanese company, would put forward at least $100 billion, aimed at creating 100,000 American jobs and advancing AI development in the U.S. Trump asked SoftBank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, to commit to a greater investment at the time.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Sajwani seemed to preempt that ask, noting that he would invest a sum greater than $20 billion “if the opportunity, the market, allow us.”
“They may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money,” Trump said of Sajwani and DAMAC.
And, indeed, the more Sajwani and DAMAC spend, the better, in Trump’s eyes; he has already promised foreign companies pledging investments worth $1 billion or more that he will expedite climate-related review processes for them if they plan to do business in the U.S. He again highlighted that promise at the press conference.
And though a recent report from Google notes that AI has the potential to mitigate 5 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, data centers still require a great deal of electricity and water to operate; they also create, in some cases, increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For instance, Google’s own GHG emissions increased by 13 percent year-over-year, which it said was “primarily driven by increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.”
Trump and Sajwani’s plans to add a slew of additional data centers throughout the U.S., with limited scrutiny on their environmental outcomes, could add to data centers’ overall footprint, which environmentalists have already expressed concern about.
DAMAC has only recently expanded into data centers through its Edgnex business, which also has plans to pop data centers up in Thailand and the Middle East.
Sajwani has been intertwined with Trump for some time; DAMAC built the Trump-branded golf club in Dubai, which opened in 2017. Trump noted that when it came to the investment, Sajwani “was very inspired by the election and wouldn’t do it without the election,” and, in turn, the billionaire businessman said he believes in the president-elect, who is set to take office on Jan. 20.
“It’s been amazing news for me and my family when he was elected in November. We’ve been waiting four years to increase our investment in [the] U.S. to very large amounts of money,” Sajwani noted at Mar-a-Lago.
