President Donald Trump spoke to Ohio supporters at a rally in Vandalia, just north of Dayton, urging the state’s workforce to consider the economic impact of data centers in the context of the United States’ competition with China over artificial intelligence.
Trump warned that shutting down data‑center operations in Ohio would hand the opportunity to China, arguing that the state could earn significant revenue if it keeps the industry local. He said the centers would bring economic benefits to Ohio’s communities.
The president has recently renamed artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” and has opposed pauses on data‑center construction, as well as calls from AI developers such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to slow research for safety reasons.
Critics argue that data centers rarely create many local jobs, increase energy costs, and produce noise, light and pollution. Senator John Husted, who faced a re‑election challenge from former Senator Sherrod Brown, has been accused of providing tax breaks to big tech for Ohio data‑center projects, a point that Brown highlighted in his campaign.
