President-elect Donald Trump has now announced an upcoming investment of $20 billion from Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, the founder of DAMAC Properties, to build data centers across the US.
The “first phase” of the investment will see the data centers being set up in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, and support the ongoing expansion of cloud services and AI technologies.
Data Centers have become hot commodity in past few years, specially ever since the AI boom kicked in. As AI tech (such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok and Google’s Gemini) continue to advance, they require immense computing capabilities to function effectively, thus generating need for more and more data infrastructure, which have now become a key priority for both private and public sectors. This is where the investment by DAMAC Properties comes in.
“It’s been amazing news for me and my family when [Trump] 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 said, adding, “We’re very, very excited, now with his leadership and his open strategy and policy to encourage businesses to come to the U.S.” The investment will be made over several years, and could even exceed the $20 billion mark, the 71-year-old Sajwani indicated.
Trump announced the development at the Mar-a-Lago press conference, introduced Sajwani as “one of the most respected business leaders in the Middle East, indeed the world.” He also went on to outline plans to expedite regulatory processes for companies that commit to investing significant sums, with $1 billion being the threshold for such benefits. “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 commented on the matter. The announcement of this investment follows a similar commitment made by Softbank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, who had earlier pledged $100 billion to the US economy, largely focused on AI and technology. At that time, the investment also aimed to create 100,000 jobs in the US.
