Jim Cramer used a Tuesday CNBC Squawk on the Street segment to answer mounting local resistance to data centers with a proposal that sounds glib until you take it seriously. If American towns keep rejecting projects, operators should look south to Queretaro, Mexico’s largest data center hub, where large cloud operators including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) already run facilities.
“The biggest data center site in Mexico is in Queretaro. If I were one of these data center companies I would say, I mean, my big foot this. If you don’t want it in your city, Mexico will take it,” Cramer said.
He extended the argument into something more constructive, urging operators to fund junior colleges and trade schools tied to facility employment in towns that do take the projects. Only one of the two halves of his pitch is likely to matter over the next few years. Amazon closed at $261.06 on August 25, 2026, and the hyperscaler capex behind that number has to land somewhere.
Why the Local Backlash Is Real
The complaints coming out of American zoning boards are concrete. Public power industry testimony to Congress noted that the average individual data center load doubled from 150 to 300 megawatts between 2023 and 2024, and that is one building on one substation.
Water use for cooling is the second objection, especially in western states where supply is already contested. Property tax abatements are the third.
The fourth is the one operators struggle to answer. A facility that consumes as much power as a small city employs few permanent staff once construction ends, and that mismatch is why the political coalition against these projects has broadened well past the usual anti-development voices.
The EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2026 projects that data center server energy use will grow to 818 billion kilowatt-hours by 2050 in its High Electricity Demand case. Every town council in Virginia or Texas is being asked to host a piece of that curve, and the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind it are the quieter way to play the buildout (we profiled seven of them in a free report here: 7 Stocks Powering the AI Boom (That Aren’t Chipmakers)).
Arbitrage and Where It Breaks
Strip the bluster, and Cramer is proposing regulatory and political arbitrage. Move the friction to a jurisdiction that welcomes it while staying close enough to serve U.S. customers.
Queretaro fits on paper. It sits within reasonable fiber distance of Texas and has aggressively courted the hyperscalers, and training runs and batch inference do not care much whether the GPU rack is in North Texas or central Mexico.
Latency is where the plan runs into physics. Real-time inference, gaming, financial systems, and consumer-facing AI features need proximity to end users, which means the American siting fight concentrates on the facilities that must stay.
Cross-border data governance and Mexican grid reliability are the parts Cramer skipped. A hyperscaler that relocates compute to escape American permitting makes a political statement of its own, one that becomes awkward the moment a U.S. administration decides to notice.
Trade School Idea Is the Better One
“You’re going to have to say, look, you know what? You think we’re going to leave here. Let me tell you about the junior college that we’re building next to this. Let me tell you about how it’s going to be a trade school. And what we’re going to do is have the trade school graduates work in and on the data center,” Cramer said.
A community investment model tied to facility employment converts a data center from something done to a town into something the town has a stake in. A junior college pipeline for technicians, electricians, and HVAC specialists changes the payroll math that drives most opposition and shifts the politics of the next expansion because the graduating class becomes a constituency.
Cramer acknowledged the industry has largely refused to do this. Abatement negotiations that are signed rarely include education funding at a scale that would matter.
Operators are more likely to reach for the arbitrage first because it is cheaper and faster than building a workforce program. The signal to watch is whether any of the top three hyperscalers announce a named trade school partnership tied to a specific U.S. facility over the next few quarters. If that happens, the better half of Cramer’s argument is finally getting traction.
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