# Trump Urges Data Center Dividends Beyond Existing Power Pledge

By Riza Dagoc

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/regulation/36820
Published: 2026-10-21T16:08:52.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-21T16:08:52.000Z
Section: Regulation

> Payments could go to host communities or residents, but Trump set no amount or deadline. A March pledge covers power and grid costs without specifying dividends.

President Donald Trump urged data center operators to pay host communities or residents a dividend, adding a potential local benefit to his administration’s effort to shield utility customers from the facilities’ power costs.

In an Oct. 21 social media post at 1:37 a.m. ET (05:37 UTC), Trump urged companies to “pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend.’” He gave no amount, payment formula or deadline. Trump had also raised resident payments and teacher bonuses in Sept. 29 remarks.

The suggestion goes beyond the March 4 Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Participating companies commit to paying for the new power supply and grid upgrades their data centers need. They may build, bring or buy power, and the pledge includes local hiring and workforce development commitments. It does not specify dividends for residents.

The dividend request appeared in the same post as Trump’s call for large data centers to generate their own electricity. His post did not set out terms for adopting payments to communities or identify which operators would pay them.

Local opposition remains a challenge for the industry. In a March 2-18 survey, 71% of Americans opposed construction of an AI data center in their area, including 48% who strongly opposed it.

Power demand is also rising. U.S. commercial-sector electricity use, a category that includes data centers, is forecast to grow 2.8% in 2027 from 2026. That projection covers the entire commercial sector, rather than data centers alone.

Some companies operate both crypto mining and computing facilities. At TeraWulf Inc.’s Lake Mariner campus, 145 megawatts of legacy Bitcoin (BTC) mining capacity operated alongside 81 megawatts of critical IT high-performance computing capacity as of June 30. TeraWulf had begun repurposing some mining infrastructure for computing workloads.