Emirati billionaire investing $20B in US to build data centers
President-elect Trump announced Tuesday that Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani plans to invest $20 billion in the United States “over a very short period of time” to build data centers across the country.
The investment will support the construction of new data centers in the Midwest and Sun Belt regions, with the first phase of the project focusing on Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana.
The influx of funds will help “keep America on the cutting edge of technology,” Trump said at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
“Artificial intelligence is very big into the data centers, and that's going to be a very hot item in the coming years,” he added.
The president-elect was joined at his Palm Beach resort Tuesday by Sajwani, who is CEO of the Dubai-based property development company DAMAC Properties.
“We're very, very excited now with his leadership and his open strategy and policy to encourage businesses to come to the U.S.,” Sajwani said of Trump. “For the last four years, we've been waiting for this moment.”
He also suggested that DAMAC could eventually increase its investment in the U.S.
The announcement comes just weeks after Trump unveiled a $100 billion investment in the U.S. from the Japanese company SoftBank focused on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
The event struck a similar tone, with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son saying his confidence in the U.S. economy had “tremendously increased” following Trump’s win in November.
Trump also vowed on Tuesday to offer expedited environmental reviews for companies, like DAMAC and SoftBank, who invest more than a billion dollars in the U.S.
“Everyone's afraid they're going to come and get caught in the quagmire, which is very prevalent in the United States unfortunately, the quagmire of environmental and various other regulations and rules,” the president-elect said.
“I made it a point of telling people, if you invest a billion dollars or more — and we'll do this for people with far less too — but we guarantee it, we're going to move them quickly through the environmental process,” he added.