Damac chairman Hussain Sajwani pledged $20 billion for U.S. data centers after Trump’s reelection
Edgerton residents have filed a lawsuit asking the city to place a potential data center ban on the November ballot, but the measure had not been placed on the ballot. The city separately sued residents who opposed a proposed Damac Properties AI data center to allow the project to proceed, and a judge dismissed that suit in September.
Edgerton, about 45 minutes outside Kansas City, has roughly 2,000 residents and is partly populated by blue-collar commuters living alongside soybean, corn and wheat farmers. The dispute is one of many similar conflicts across America as developers race to build enough processing power to meet demand from AI companies. Dubai-based Damac Properties is led by Hussain Sajwani, a close ally of President Trump who pledged to spend $20 billion on U.S. data centers after Trump’s reelection.
Two lawsuits leave November ballot status unresolved
A group of citizens began circulating a petition in late July to let residents vote on whether data centers should be allowed. “When the city added data centers ‘by right’ they bypassed the public process and didn’t give us a voice,” Kim Twente said.
The group collected more than double the number of signatures needed and delivered the petition to the county’s voter office, where it was determined to meet all legal requirements. The measure still had not been placed on the November ballot. Residents packed a city council meeting this month, with some arguing that council members should step down.
In court, the city has argued that zoning approvals are administrative and therefore exempt from public ballot initiatives. The city spokeswoman said, “There’s obviously some concern that it could open us up to legal issues because Damac is a property owner.” Linus Baker, the lawyer representing the petitioners, said the ballot initiative concerns a new land-use policy and is therefore legislative. “It’s a red herring that just because Damac is a property owner they have some sort of right to build a data center,” Baker said.
Zoning changes followed NorthPoint’s industrial buildout
Before Damac arrived, Kansas City-based NorthPoint Development built Logistics Park Kansas City over roughly the previous decade. The industrial project influenced local politics in Edgerton.
Logistics Park Kansas City spans more than 2,300 acres and is anchored by a railway intermodal facility. More than 15 million square feet of industrial space houses distribution hubs for companies including Amazon, funneling freight from West Coast ports into the heartland.
NorthPoint acquired acreage for the facility through a web of entities with names like Hillsdale Land and Cattle LLC. Land it acquired in unincorporated Johnson County was later annexed into the City of Edgerton. By the time local farmers learned who was behind the purchases, NorthPoint held a substantial share of the surrounding farmland.
When the data center boom took off, NorthPoint was sitting on thousands of acres already approved for industrial development, many with empty warehouses already built on them. The Wall Street Journal reported that NorthPoint also benefited from what it described as “a cooperative municipal government.” NorthPoint did not respond to requests for comment.
In March 2025, NorthPoint asked city staff to confirm that data centers fit within existing development codes. The following month, Edgerton designated data centers as permitted “by right” within the industrial zone, allowing the project to bypass mandatory rezoning public hearings. Kansas was also working to attract such development. Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation offering 20-year tax incentives for hyperscale data centers.
LaFalce attributes higher costs to industrial expansion
William LaFalce, 65, bought his home in Edgerton in the early 1990s on an Army salary. “It was just like a Rockwell painting,” he said. “Three churches, a grocery store and no stoplight.”
LaFalce said he opposes the Damac project because it would continue adding to the industrial complex. He said the industrial expansion was affecting the community and pushing up local taxes and living costs. His 35-year-old daughter, a printing press operator, was priced out of a loft apartment in a nearby town because of rising regional rents and moved back in with him.
At the same time, local taxpayers in Edgerton have faced mounting property tax bills. Last year, LaFalce withdrew funds from his IRA to help cover his property taxes, which rose about 31% over five years. “Now I’m stuck,” he said. “For me to sell my house to afford a lifestyle on retired pay, I’d have to move hundreds of miles out.”
Edgerton added a 1% special-project sales tax. To ease the burden on homeowners, the city offered one-time tax rebates of 10% this year and 40% next year.
Water, runoff and backup fuel
Edgerton sits near Hillsdale Lake, a regional reservoir supplying drinking water to about 56,000 residents. Kim Twente, one of the residents sued by the city over the ballot petition, is concerned about the project’s ecological impacts and the potential for runoff into a small stream running across Damac’s property that ultimately feeds into the Hillsdale watershed.
Damac has promised a closed-loop cooling system that will require less water to operate, and those systems must be flushed for routine maintenance. Damac told the city it will not discharge into wastewater or groundwater, the city spokeswoman said. “Anytime they need to flush those lines, they’ll truck it off-site,” she said.
To ensure servers never go offline, Damac’s plans also call for backup diesel generators. The generators would be stored on-site in large aboveground units with “belly tanks,” and the fuel presented a fire and environmental concern for Edgerton’s planning commission.
The commission rejected Damac’s site plan in June 2026, citing safety and environmental risks associated with the fuel tanks. The city council overturned the denial after Damac confirmed the tanks would be underground. The city spokeswoman said the council stepped in only because Damac had appealed the decision.
Damac’s business ties and political relationships
Damac has worked with Trump on several Middle East developments, including a luxury golf community bearing the president’s name, and has paid millions of dollars in management and licensing fees to the Trump Organization since 2013, federal filings show. The Edgerton project is one of several Damac plans to build across the country, part of Sajwani’s pledge to spend $20 billion on U.S. data centers after Trump was re-elected.
“We’ve been waiting four years to increase our investments in the U.S. to a very large amount of money,” Sajwani said in January 2025 at Mar-a-Lago, weeks before Trump’s second inauguration. He declined to comment for the article.
After Sajwani spoke, Trump went onstage, rattled off states where Damac would build and told him: “Hussain, we’re going to work with you and make sure everything goes smoothly.” Trump suggested the projects would secure expedited reviews, bypassing what he called “the quagmire of environmental and various other regulations and rules,” and said others investing more than $1 billion could expect the same.
Kansas was not mentioned onstage that day, but Edgerton soon became Damac’s primary launchpad when the developer purchased a warehouse and parcel in early 2026. Asked whether Trump supported the Edgerton project specifically, a White House spokeswoman said: “President Trump’s bold leadership is turning data centers into engines of growth and opportunity for communities across the country that want them, all while cementing America’s dominance over China” in the global AI race.
Mayor Donald Roberts has supported the industrial complex on the outskirts of town where the data center would be built. Roberts has not publicly taken a position for or against the Damac project, a city spokeswoman said. Edgerton voters have overwhelmingly supported Trump in each of the last three elections.