Trump Warned Towns They’d End Up Poor Without Data Centers but Berkshire’s CEO Sees a Revolt Growing

Rich Duprey

Thu, September 3, 2026 at 6:45 PM GMT+3 5 min read

Quick Read

Greg Abel of BRK-B flags growing nationwide resistance to data centers as Pennsylvania makes community consent a legal prerequisite for construction permits.
NVDA up 20% and VRT up 59% this year price in frictionless AI buildout, a bet zoning boards and rate-shock headlines could unwind.
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On September 2, 2026, three things happened within roughly 24 hours. Craft Ventures co-founder and White House AI adviser David Sacks amplified a political messaging script coaching candidates to frame data centers as "life preservers" for "drowning American towns." Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE:BRK-A)(NYSE:BRK-B) Greg Abel told CNBC there is "a lot more pushback" on data center construction across the country. And Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order making local community support a permit prerequisite for new sites. Three separate signals, one message: the roughly $1 trillion in AI capital expenditure that investors are underwriting has run into a political problem large enough to require coordinated damage control.

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Buildout Meets Backlash

Sacks himself has quantified the scale. "Something like $800 billion of capex is being invested this year. I've seen forecasts for 1.4 trillion next year," he said last week, adding that he would not be surprised if 2026 clears $1 trillion. The demand side of that number lives inside NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), which reported $96.22 billion in quarterly revenue and told investors it expects fiscal 2028 growth of approximately 70%, capped only by supply. CEO Jensen Huang put the cloud-industry backlog at greater than $2 trillion, with the top five hyperscalers on pace to spend $1.3 trillion in 2027.

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The physical footprint of that money is what towns are now fighting. Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR) has 1.4 gigawatts under construction at a total cost of $20 billion and a growth runway of 9 gigawatts. CEO Andy Power conceded on the July call that "as an industry, we are becoming significantly more visible" and that "it is becoming more and more challenging to deliver the critical digital infrastructure" customers want.

The power side is tighter still. Constellation Energy (NASDAQ:CEG) signed 920 megawatts of long-term nuclear power purchase agreements last quarter at durations of 18 and a half years, and PJM's 2028/2029 capacity auction cleared at $325/MW-day. That price is exactly what residential ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic will see on their bills, and it is the number driving statehouse letters and county-commission fights.

Congressional research on the sector concluded that "data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions" in PJM. Vertiv (NYSE:VRT), which supplies the cooling and power gear, just announced an acquisition explicitly aimed at accelerating "time to power" for AI data centers. The picks-and-shovels names powering, cooling, and networking these sites are the ones we profiled in a free report on seven AI infrastructure stocks that aren't chipmakers.

Why Buffett's Successor Is the Tell

Berkshire Hathaway is the skeptical voice that matters because Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns regulated utilities across six states and Abel spent his career running them. Berkshire's operating earnings rose to $12.98 billion last quarter, and the company deployed roughly $23.5 billion into equities including a $10 billion Alphabet stake. When Abel flags a revolt, he is speaking as the operator who has to file the rate cases the revolt shows up in. BRK-B is up just 0.52% year to date; NVDA is up 20.47%; VRT is up 58.52%. The gap prices in a world where the buildout continues without friction.

What to Watch Before the Midterms

Shapiro's Pennsylvania order is the template. Watch whether Virginia, Ohio, Texas, and Georgia adopt similar community-consent triggers before November, and watch PJM's response to FERC on co-location rules, which Constellation expects in the first to second quarter of 2027. A single high-profile permit denial in Loudoun County or a rate-shock headline out of Ohio would validate Abel over Sacks and force NVIDIA's hyperscaler customers to explain how a supply-constrained pipeline gets built when the constraint moves from wafers to zoning boards. The AI trade has priced in the chips. It has not priced in the county commission.

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