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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Despite Americans’ growing hostility toward AI data centers—especially near their neighborhoods—President Donald Trump has said that "everything’s good around them" and residents stand to benefit from their proximity—including by seeing their home equity climb.
"Any community that turns down AI is making a big mistake, because your taxes are going to go way down; if you own a house, it’s going to be more valuable. It’s a tremendous thing," the president said during an interview with Fox News’ Night with Trace Gallagher aired on Tuesday.
"It’s almost like there’s a campaign against data centers. But data centers, if you look at the stats, everything’s good around them," he added. He then said that critics of data centers should look instead at "cities run by Democrats, because that’s the threat to the country, because they are a disaster."
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Sixty-three percent of U.S. voters oppose AI data centers being built in or near their community, according to a July poll by Emerson College, up 21 percentage points from when the question was last asked in December 2025.
Data centers are a relatively recent phenomenon and research on their impact on the communities around them and the U.S. housing market is still at its early stages. But recent analyses suggest that data centers have the potential to reshape real estate markets across the nation.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment by email on Wednesday morning.
The Case for Data Centers Boosting Home Prices
One such study was published last year by George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis at Schar School of Policy and Government, in Virginia. Home to more than 650 data centers, the state has been at the center of the new technology boom in recent years, especially Northern Virginia—what is now known as Data Center Alley.
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The study, which refers to 2023 data, found that there was a direct negative relationship between distance to data centers and home prices—meaning that, the farther a home was from a data center, the lower its sales price. On the other hand, the closer a home was to a data center, the higher was its sales price.
That was true for all types of homes, including single-family detached homes, townhomes, and condos. According to researchers, the negative relationship can probably be rooted back to the fact that data centers cluster in places with strong infrastructure, good transportation links, and plentiful jobs—all factors that also attract homebuyers.
This analysis backs what the president told Fox News: data centers bring up home prices in the neighborhoods hosting them. But there are limits to what it can tell us about the impact of data centers on home values on a bigger scale; the study only analyzed one market—Virginia—and does not necessarily prove that data centers were the only reason for higher prices.
"At no point am I saying that data centers are an add-on," Terry L. Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis and a co-author of the report, previously told Newsweek. The more likely explanation, he said, is that data centers "go where the infrastructure exists"—the same infrastructure homebuyers value.
On top of that, realtors operating in areas now hosting data centers—or expected to see one rise on their land—have reported mixed impacts in their markets.
And the Case for Data Centers Lowering Them
Data centers have proven able to boost demand and raise land values, but homeowners across the U.S. are growing increasingly concerned about data centers’ impact on their communities, as they worry over noise, water use, energy consumption and bills. These are issues that could make properties less desirable—and bring prices lower.
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Jerry Allen, a realtor with eXp Realty and member of the Granbury, Texas, planning and zoning commission, told HousingWire in July that the people living near a proposed data center in the area "are obviously not very happy about it, and they’re having a hard time [selling] their property."
In Granbury, home prices fell 8.2 percent to $380,000 over the past year, according to HousingWire data, even though there is no way of linking this drop directly to data centers.
A study published earlier this year examining Loudoun County, Virginia—home to 176 data centers, more than double the number of any other U.S. county—found that houses within 0.5 miles of an announced data center sold for roughly 2.8 percent less than similar homes slightly farther away.
So, Is Trump Right or Wrong?
More data will be necessary to ultimately establish what the impact of data centers on home prices will be.
At the moment, studies suggest that data centers can have two different effects at once: on one side, they may boost regional economic activity, jobs, tax revenue, and demand for housing, which can support higher home prices in the area surrounding them.
But homes located very close to a data center may face concerns over noise, visual impact, traffic, water consumption, and industrialization, which can suppress demand and eventually weigh on prices.
A lot will depend on what happens in the coming months and years. Over 1,500 new data centers are in development nationwide, according to Pew Research Center. The Berkeley Research Group gives an even higher estimate, reporting that about 3,000 data center projects are at various stages of development nationwide.
Will the country’s AI gamble pay off, and will Americans be able to get a piece of the AI pie? Will the promise of riches for all made by the new technology hold true, and will it be able to offset the job displacement expected as a result of it?
Or will Americans’ rising antagonism against data centers continue growing, with more opposition from locals to new developments in their neighborhoods?
Around one in five Americans or more told the Pew Research Center earlier this year that they aren’t sure of data centers’ impact on the environment, home energy costs, people’s quality of life nearby, local jobs, and local tax revenues.
At the moment, Americans are more likely to see positive than negative effects on local jobs (25 percent vs. 15 percent) and local tax revenue (23 percent vs. 12 percent), while they feel the opposite way for the environment (39 percent vs. 4 percent), home energy costs (38 percent vs. 6 percent) and the quality of life for those nearby (30 percent vs. 6 percent).
As a general mistrust of the technology grows among the population, a majority of Americans would currently oppose having a data center in their community, according to a recent Ipsos Consumer Tracker, with Republicans at 49 percent, Democrats at 62 percent and independents at 52 percent.
There is also another factor to consider—how data centers may be impacting the housing stock.
In a recent research piece, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said data center developers were offering "impossible prices" for developable land, easily outbidding homebuilders and thus killing new home construction projects.
"A builder’s land budget is capped by what home buyers can afford. Every dollar spent on land gets passed through to the price of the finished home, and buyers have no room to absorb it," NAHB wrote in its report.
Considering that the U.S. housing market has a gap of millions of affordable homes—for an estimated shortage between 1.5 million and 10 million—residential developers’ inability to compete with data centers might exacerbate this lack of supply, eventually leading up to higher home prices.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Tobias Meyjes and Yannick Demoustier.
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