Two weeks before taking office, President Trump appeared alongside Hussain Sajwani, an Emirati billionaire and the chairman of Dubai-based luxury real estate firm DAMAC Properties at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. Sajwani announced that his company would spend $20 billion to develop data centers in the U.S., as Trump suggested he could secure “expedited reviews” for the projects—and his administration followed through. What neither man said at the press conference was that Trump has netted millions of dollars from their joint business ventures.

One year into Trump’s second term, DAMAC is apparently planning to develop a data center outside of Canton, Ohio. In January, city officials identified millions of dollars in infrastructure needs to support the project. Utilities in Canton are already getting more expensive: in February, the city government announced an increase in utility costs, driven in part by the cost of electricity. Ohio has become a top target for data center developers—which are driving up utility costs for residents and small business owners nationwide—and it’s causing a spike in electricity bills. 

Beyond staging the event at Trump’s private resort, which he continues to own and profit from while in office, Sajwani and Trump have a longstanding relationship spanning over two decades. Sajwani is currently a Mar-a-Lago member, according to an interview in January. He appears to have joined the club sometime during or since the first Trump term, when the club became a locus of pay-to-play influence and the cost of a new membership has soared. According to CNN, he was not a member as of 2018. In an interview following the announcement, Sajwani seemed to say he’d pitched the incoming president on bringing data centers to the U.S. while at the club for a New Year’s Eve event. He told Forbes that DAMAC had been contemplating a move to the U.S. prior to Trump’s reelection but “wanted to see a more friendly administration…[w]hen I arrived [at Mar-a-Lago] for the new year, I spoke to [Trump] and he welcomed the idea.”

Sajwani’s company, DAMAC Properties, has partnered with the Trump Organization on two golf courses in Dubai: Trump International Golf Club, which opened in 2017, and Trump World Golf Club, which apparently remains in development. CREW’s analysis of financial disclosures indicates that DAMAC Properties has paid Trump at least $13 million, and possibly as much as $19 million, in licensing and management fees related to the properties.

Sajwani met with President Trump and Elon Musk at the White House in April 2025. He also attended an inaugural event at Trump’s Virginia golf club and visited Turnberry in July 2025. He often spends New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago.

The initial press release from EDGNEX (now known as DAMAC Digital) said that data center development would be focused in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. At the time of Sajwani’s announcement, nobody in the governors’ offices or public utility commissions in any of those states had been contacted by DAMAC or Trump’s team regarding the proposal. 

In December 2025, DAMAC Digital Solution Ohio purchased a plot of land in Canton Township, Ohio from AIDC Canton 2, an LLC reportedly associated with data center developer Active Infrastructure, for $36.5 million. Immediately prior to the DAMAC sale, AIDC paid $8.8 million to purchase the land from Terredigm, a company that redevelops brownfield sites.

Canton has pursued annexation of a number of lots in recent months, including the one that was eventually sold to DAMAC. Annexation often happens when a property adjacent to city limits wants to use city services, like water utilities. Canton’s water department superintendent estimated that it would cost $3.7 million to supply water to the site that DAMAC Digital has purchased, specifying that the source of funding for that extension would need to be negotiated between the city and the developer. Nearby in Perry Township, a data center development is at the center of an annexation dispute resulting in refused requests for water service. A petition opposing that development has received nearly three thousand signatures. 

Across the state, Ohioans have pushed back on the area’s data center boom. As tech companies seek increases in computing power to support AI products, communities where data centers are being developed are voicing concerns regarding rising utility costs, electrical grid capacity, water consumption, and pollutants. Ohio’s environmental agency recently released a draft permit that would allow data centers to release wastewater into rivers. Developers often tout the jobs that prospective data centers will provide to local economies, but those are typically short-term construction jobs. The data centers themselves do little to generate long-term employment.

At the press conference where Sajwani announced DAMAC’s upcoming development plans, Trump suggested that he could secure “expedited reviews” for Sajwani’s data center projects in the U.S. to circumvent a “quagmire of environmental and various other regulations and rules.” He promised the same to any company that invests at least $1 billion in the U.S. 

More broadly, the Trump administration has taken actions to support data center development. As part of his administration’s AI Action Plan, which included policies designed to “expedit[e] and moderniz[e] permits for data centers,” Trump issued an executive order stating that it would be “a priority of my Administration to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout” of data center infrastructure “by easing Federal regulatory burdens.” In September, the EPA announced that, pursuant to the executive order, the agency would “prioritiz[e] the review of new chemicals…that are intended for use in data center projects or for the manufacturing of covered components.” 

While demand for data centers grows to accommodate new technologies, a growing body of evidence shows that it may come at the expense of the communities where they are built. Trump’s relationship with Sajwani raises significant questions about whose voices will ring loudest with the president.

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