TMTPOST -- U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced billions of dollar of new investment in data centers from an Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, founder and chairman of a property developer based in Dubai.

Credit：Xinhua News Agency

Sajwani is pledging at least $20 billion over a very short period of time to build new data enters in the United States, Trump said at a news conference at his home Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach Florida. The investment may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money, Trump added, stressing his commitment to expedite regulatory approvals for billion-dollar investments.

The new data centers will be located in the Midwest and Sun Belt, according to Trump. He said the first phase of the project will be in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. The president-elect express gratitude for Sajwani’s support of massive data centers, and believed that will “keep America on the cutting edge of technology and artificial intelligence (AI).”

"It's amazing news for me and my family when he [Trump] was [re]elected in November. We've been waiting four years to increase our investments in the US. It's a very large amount of money. We are a company operating in more than 20 countries around the world,” Sajwani said in his brief alongside Trump at the press. "We are very excited now with his [Trump's] leadership and his open strategy and policy to encourage businesses to come to the US. For the last four years we have waited for this moment and we plan to invest $20 billion," the proper developer said.

Sajwani’s company Damac Properties owns the Middle East's only Trump-branded golf course in Dubai, which opened in 2017, and the billionaire celebrated the New Year with Trump in Florida. "We have delivered more than 45,000 luxury units and another 45,000 more in the pipeline. In data centres we are in 10 countries around the world, in Asia, Europe and the Middle East," said the founder who has a long-standing relationship with Trump.

Sajwani investment came amid datacenter frenzy driven by AI boom. Four U.S. tech giants alone-- Microsoft Corporation, Meta Platformas Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. spent more than $200 billion last year in capital expenditures, or capex, as they are scrambling to facilitate the AI build-out. Data centers powering AI are deemed as a key for them to keep up with the technology innovation. Capex became the key growth ingredient iin the AI arms race so far.