Welcome back to The Art of the Scam, where we follow the dirty money powering the Trump regime.
Donald has spent the last year promoting the rapid construction of massive data centers as essential to America’s economic future. On July 23, 2025, Donald signed an executive order directing the federal government to accelerate data center construction by easing regulatory requirements and making federal land available for development. A year later, Donald was still personally making the sales pitch.
Here’s what he had to say about energy and the so called Green New Deal:
But the Democrats in Congress want less energy, not more. And if given the chance, they’d send your prices soaring and inflation skyrocketing, which is exactly what would happen if you had somebody else sitting in the position that I am right now.
And just like we did with the Green New Scam, where we were scammed, the whole country was, I wasn’t scammed. I got it right from the beginning. I got it from the first minute when I heard this crap. They were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn’t watch your television.
They wanted to watch the debate, Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn’t blowing. Remember that? “Darling, we’d like to watch the debate tonight.” “I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.” No, that’s one of the great scams of all time.
Says the man who has spent the last year promoting data centers.
Donald also had something to say about the communities that don’t want data centers built in their backyards, for very valid reasons that we’ll get to later.
And the ones that don’t want it, the happiest people in the world are foreign countries, number one and number two, other communities within our country because they’re begging for them to be there. And some of them are great communities, very, very forward looking communities, very smart communities.
I’m not entirely sure how to make sense of that, except that Donald seems to be saying only smart people in smart communities want data centers. What he neglects to mention, because it’s inconvenient, is that he himself has millions of dollars invested in companies connected to the industry he’s promoting. In other words, as with pretty much any other venture in which he’s involved, including cryptocurrency and meme coins, it’s all a big grift designed to enrich him, his useless children, and his cronies, even if it’s terrible for the people of this country.
On October 1, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also known as CREW, published an analysis of Donald’s 2026 financial disclosure. CREW identified 11 companies in Donald’s portfolio that own, operate, develop, or provide infrastructure for data centers. At the end of 2025, those investments were worth between $2.9 million and $9.5 million, an increase of at least 600 percent from the end of 2024.
That doesn’t include his investments in Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, or Oracle, all companies that he has sued or settled with to enrich himself in exchange for deregulating them. Donald says he doesn’t direct his stock trades and that investment decisions are made by outside financial managers. According to CREW, those managers made 292 trades involving the 11 identified data center companies after Donald returned to office. I suppose we’re just supposed to believe that’s a coincidence.
Meanwhile, the Trump regime has continued making data center construction easier. In July, the EPA issued guidance giving developers greater flexibility to build their own power generation without being subject to one federal Clean Air Act program that applies to grid connected facilities.
One of the companies making enormous investments in the data center boom is SoftBank, the Japanese technology giant. Its subsidiary, SB Energy, is developing large scale energy and data center infrastructure in the United States. In January 2026, SoftBank donated $50 million to Donald’s Presidential Library Foundation. Two months later, the Departments of Energy and Commerce announced a public private partnership involving SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy to develop a massive AI data center on federal land in Portsmouth, Ohio.
The proposed project could use as much as 10 gigawatts of electricity, roughly enough to power 10 million homes. And that’s the part Donald doesn’t want to talk about. Data centers are destructive to the environment, and they consume enormous amounts of resources, including water and electricity, driving up costs for everybody else while providing no good in return.
These data centers have barely any need for human participation, so they aren’t creating jobs. They’re just another way to enrich Donald, his cronies, and his children at the expense of the American people, while our environment is degraded and our water supply is wasted.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, as well as Representative Melanie Stansbury, have questioned whether the $50 million contribution by SB Energy was connected to favorable treatment from the administration. My guess is yes.
Northern Virginia is already finding out what this data center boom means for local communities. The state has the largest concentration of data centers in the country, and a Virginia legislative study found that meeting even half of the projected data center demand would require increasing the state’s electricity generation capacity by 80 to 90 percent and its transmission capacity by 36 percent by 2040.
That same study modeled what the expansion could mean for Dominion Energy customers. Under its highest data center demand scenario, the generation and transmission portion of a typical residential electric bill would increase by $23 a month by 2030 and $37 a month by 2040, in 2024 dollars. Those estimates don’t include distribution charges or some additional transmission costs.
And this isn’t just happening in Northern Virginia. As data centers consume a growing share of the country’s electricity, the cost of supplying that power is increasingly showing up in Americans’ electric bills. More Perfect Union looked at how this is already happening across the country.
When I noticed my electric bill had gone up, I started asking my neighbors, “Is your bill also going up?” And they had no idea that this was happening.
If you live in any of these states, your electric bill is higher this summer. It’s not because of anything you did. You’re paying more because the world’s biggest tech companies are building so many data centers.
I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time, but I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space.
The report also asked whether the United States was committed to building data centers across its 60 regions.
We are absolutely going to.
The report continued:
Big Tech’s quest for artificial intelligence is creating a tidal wave of new costs that are about to hit all of us, even if you live nowhere near a data center.
Another speaker explained the problem:
The big problem is that we’re all subsidizing the wealthiest corporations in the world in their pursuit of artificial intelligence.
And the result?
Americans’ utility bills are rising while Big Tech’s profits are going through the roof.
Seventy five percent of Americans say they oppose having a data center built near where they live. And yet House Speaker Mike Johnson has a very different explanation for the growing backlash.
Here’s how the conversation went:
Interviewer: Do you think that, with regards to China, I mean, I’ve had several tech executives and lawmakers, to be clear, say that the information against data centers, that pushback against data centers, is coming from China?
Mike Johnson: Yes.
Interviewer: They believe that. The Democrats are seizing on this, though. They’re making this their messaging. They’ve been very clear they’re going to take this into the midterms. How do you fight that?
Mike Johnson: This is what Democrats do. Every election cycle, they find something to glom onto and say that this is doom and gloom and everyone will die if we don’t win. Don’t buy it. It is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. It’s not a conspiracy theory. I think they’re pushing those ideas.
I think Mike Johnson is a Chinese psyop, actually. And of course, that’s a lie. They think we’re stupid.
The environmental cost of data centers is real, and it’s steep. Data center electricity consumption already produces about 180 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions globally every year, at a time when the threat from catastrophic climate change is increasing. The International Energy Agency projects those emissions will increase by almost 80 percent by 2030. In other words, we’re going in exactly the opposite direction from where we need to go if we’re ever going to combat catastrophic climate change.
Electricity is only part of the cost. American data centers directly consumed an estimated 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023, much of it simply to keep servers cool. More than a hundred proposed data center moratoriums are now being considered around the country as communities confront the demands these facilities place on electricity, water, and the environment.
Meanwhile, the Trump regime is accelerating construction, opening federal land to development and removing regulatory barriers. There’s one other thing worth mentioning: the size of these things.
The average data center covers roughly 100,000 square feet. That’s about two football fields. But some are as large as one million square feet, which is a number so large it kind of boggles the mind. Do we really think the best use of our federal land is to build a bunch of data centers that don’t provide jobs and destroy our environment?
On September 29, Donald’s own Palm Beach County unanimously approved a one year moratorium on new large scale data centers. After Donald told us that communities rejecting data centers were choosing poverty, unemployment, crime, and squalor, he was asked whether he would want one near his own home.
Here’s another thing about data centers: they produce an enormous amount of noise pollution. Donald’s answer was predictable.
It doesn’t mean I want them right next to my house.
Yeah, no kidding. And none of the rest of us do either.
When it comes to what Americans want, Donald thinks we should be thrilled to have them. Here’s how he described the benefits:
The people are going to benefit directly, whether it’s teachers that get paid a bonus, whether it’s people that live in the community that get paid a dividend. You could call it a dividend because the dividend sounds right. They are going to greatly benefit by what’s happened.
The data centers are incredible. And by the way, I’m very good at real estate. Some of those buildings are absolutely beautiful. They’re big and they’re big, strong, powerful buildings, but they’re beautiful and they add greatly to a community.
It started with a false narrative, mostly by Mike, I would say Democrats.
Yes. A big, strong, powerful, beautiful hunk of cement that covers massive amounts of land that could be used for much better purposes.
These things benefit nobody. They’re destructive, in fact. But they benefit the people who are rich and want to get richer. So that’s just fine with Donald, because he happens to be one of them.
No one wants Donald. Not even his wife.
Your uncle is the biggest POS to ever hold hold office in 250 years. I can't wait for him to serve the sentence handed out by NYS.