Trump: Data Centers Are One of the Biggest Job Drivers of the Future

President Trump used a Truth Social post to hammer New York over its new hyperscale data center freeze, framing the buildout as a core future jobs engine and warning the state is handing capital to competitors.

What Trump said

Trump wrote that one of the biggest driving forces in the future for jobs are data centers, and that they are big, strong, bold, and money machines for the state in which they are built.

He said Governor Kathy Hochul, for political reasons, has terminated all data centers being built, or to be built, in New York State, and that these companies are now being sought in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and many other states. He called both the taxes and the jobs “liquid gold” and said New York had made a terrible decision.

The New York moratorium

New York became the first state in the U.S. to impose a ban of its kind when the governor signed the executive order Tuesday. The temporary order applies only to certain new facilities requiring at least 50 megawatts.

Permits already issued are unaffected, while applications already deemed complete can continue through the Department of Environmental Conservation process, and certain lower-power projects serving research, education or health care can also qualify for exceptions. Hochul will pause state environmental permits for up to a year to give the state time to put together a framework to protect the environment, energy grid and help New Yorkers’ electrical bills.

Why this matters for the AI trade

The International Energy Agency estimates that an AI-focused hyperscale center can require 100 megawatts or more, while the biggest facilities can use yearly electricity equal to that of 100,000 households. That power intensity is why siting decisions have become a market variable, not just a local zoning fight.

New York's grid interconnection queue contained 11.9 gigawatts of pending large-load projects as of February 2026, and more than 8.3 gigawatts entered the queue during 2025, although not every request represented a data center. If that pipeline shifts to the Sun Belt, the beneficiaries are the developers, utilities, and equipment names already scaling there.

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Political pushback

Hochul responded that the state hit pause because the communities powering AI should share in its success, adding that maybe that is a novel concept in Washington and that she calls it doing her job.

The Data Center Coalition said the policy would redirect investment and jobs outside New York, while a June Siena Research Institute poll found that 46% of respondents considered a one-year moratorium good for the state and 21% considered it bad. For traders, the read-through is that data center siting risk is now a bipartisan political variable, not a one-state story. You can track more policy and market headlines here.

Options market and stocks to watch

Watch NVDA for any shift in commentary around U.S. hyperscale deployment timing, since chip demand is downstream of where and when these campuses actually get built.

Watch MSFT, GOOGL, and META as hyperscalers most exposed to state-level permitting risk and capex reallocation to the Sun Belt.

Watch VRT and EQIX as data center infrastructure and colocation names that benefit directly if projects migrate to friendlier states rather than get cancelled outright.

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