President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday of a $20 billion foreign investment for the construction of data centers in the U.S. is considered a boon in the development and expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency as the digital economy goes into hyperdrive, requiring even greater sources of computer processing power.
The mega-investment by DAMAC Properties in the United Arab Emirates, and its billionaire owner Hussain Sajwani, follows a $100 billion pledge from Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son last month to invest in the U.S.
Trump said plans are to quickly collect investments of $1 billion or more from the Emirati company via the environmental regulatory review process.
“It’s been amazing news for me and my family when he was elected in November,” Sajwani, a business partner of the Trump family, said in a news conference Tuesday.
DAMAC Properties built the Trump International Golf Club outside the desert city-state shortly before Trump first entered the White House in 2017. DAMAC also pays a multimillion-dollar licensing fee to the Trump Organization. Sajwani has been seen at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida since his re-election in November.
Trump, a real estate tycoon who fancies himself a builder on a grand scale, is pushing for big projects as a showcase for his administration. And tech is looking for a boom in data centers to handle the mountains of energy necessary to power the AI and robotics revolution led by the likes of NVIDIA Corp., OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp.
Indeed, Blackstone estimates the U.S. will see investments of $1 trillion in data centers over five years, with another $1 trillion committed to those types of facilities internationally.
Sajwani’s considerable commitment accounts for just 2% of the total expected domestic investment in the sector. But it represents an opportunity for the private developer to gain traction in the U.S.
Overseas, the company already has or plans to build its EDGNEX data centers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, Indonesia and Thailand.
While developers are feverishly building data centers, Big Tech companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft and Google are pouring billions of dollars into nuclear energy facilities to supply companies with emissions-free electricity to feed their AI services.
The tech giants are scrambling to strike deals and partnerships with operators and developers of nuclear power plants to refurbish traditional power plants or build small modular reactors, which offer a smaller footprint and quicker building times.
