President-elect Donald Trump today announced that Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani will invest $20 billion to build new data centers in the U.S.

The investment could eventually “somewhat more than double,” Trump stated during a Mar-a-Lago press conference. 

Sajwani is the founder of DAMAC Properties, a major property development company based in the United Arab Emirates. In 2017, DAMAC built a golf course called Trump International Golf Club Dubai. The company has reportedly paid a multimillion-dollar licensing fee to the Trump Organization, while Sajwani contributed between $1 million and $5 million to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The planned $20 billion investment announced today will be made over several years. It will finance the construction of data centers Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas.

“The investment will support massive new data centers across the Midwest, the Sun Belt area, and also to keep America on the cutting edge of technology and artificial intelligence,” Trump said.

There’s no word on which companies will use the new data centers to host their infrastructure. It’s also unclear whether the plan will include investments in new energy projects. The major cloud providers, which spend billions of dollars annually on data centers, have made significant investments in renewable energy projects to support their facilities’ power requirements. 

In one of the largest such projects to date, Microsoft Corp. last May signed a $10 billion deal to add more renewable energy capacity in the U.S. and Europe. The project will be carried out in partnership with investment firm Brookfield. In recent quarters, Microsoft and other hyperscalers have also started prioritizing nuclear energy as part of their data center initiatives. 

One of the factors behind the surge in new data center construction is that AI servers have different technical requirements than standard machines. The heat they generate is dissipated using liquid cooling rather than fans, the technology historically used for the task. As a result, cloud providers and other companies are building new facilities specifically optimized for liquid cooling. 

According to the Associated Press, an estimated $1 trillion will be spent on U.S. data centers in the coming years. The same amount is set to be invested in international cloud facilities. DAMAC has reportedly built or plans to build data centers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Spain, Thailand and Indonesia.

Trump’s announcement of the $20 billion investment comes less than a month after he held a similar press conference with Masayoshi Son, the Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Group Corp.. Son announced plans to invest $100 billion in “AI and related infrastructure,” CNBC reported. That hints some of the capital could go towards adding data center capacity.

A few days before SoftBank detailed the investment, Trump announced plans to offer “fully expedited approvals and permits” for foreign companies that invest at least $1 billion in the U.S.

Such investments didn’t always meet expectations in the past. In 2017, Trump announced that Foxconn would spend $10 billion on a new display factory near Milwaukee. The electronics manufacturer later slashed that sum to $672 million and created only 1,000 of the 13,000 jobs it had promised.

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