CoreWeave chief executive Michael Intrator said on Wednesday that orders for artificial-intelligence data centers had not declined, dismissing growing political opposition to the facilities’ construction across the United States.

“There has absolutely not been any reduction in orders,” Intrator said on CNBC’s Squawk On The Street. CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider that began as a cryptocurrency miner, is among the infrastructure companies most exposed if opposition to data centers produces nationwide restrictions.

A regulatory crackdown would only move construction elsewhere, he said. “The regulations that are being brought out around data centers, all they are going to do is they’re going to relocate the infrastructure,” he said. “They’re not going to in any way reduce the demand... It’s just a question of where you put it. Nothing more than that.”

In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the country’s first statewide moratorium on large-scale data centers, and governors in other states, including Republicans, have moved to cut tax incentives the industry has historically received. Candidates from both parties in November’s midterm elections have labelled opponents too close to the AI industry, and CoreWeave cited New York’s moratorium as a potential risk in its latest quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found 65% of registered voters opposed the construction of a data center in their community.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump hosted executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia at a private White House lunch on the technology’s future and told reporters that data centers “are gonna be very popular”. “This is a group that loves local communities,” Trump said. “They are going to work with local communities for the data centers, in particular. And they’re going to make the community happy.”

The divide also reached Washington’s nightlife at the weekend. More than 1,000 people registered for Data after Dark, a pro-data-center party at a bitcoin-themed bar, after organisers from tech media company Pirate Wires, the nonprofit Young Voices and the R Street Institute promoted it online. At least three protesters attempted to interrupt toasts at the event before being booed from the stage.

The industry is still building at a large scale. The United States has more than 3,000 operating data centers and over 1,500 under development, according to Pew Research Center figures, and US facilities consumed about 313 terawatt-hours in 2025, nearly 40% of global data-center electricity use and more than Australia used that year, according to the Energy Institute. Berkeley Lab projects data centers will consume 11.8% of US electricity by 2030, up from about 4.4% in 2023.

Among the largest projects tracked by Business Insider are a Texas campus pursuing up to 17 gigawatts of capacity, a site in Ohio aiming for 10 gigawatts most of which OpenAI has contracted to use, a $16 billion, 1.4-gigawatt Oracle campus in Michigan and a $10 billion, 1-gigawatt Meta center in Lebanon, Indiana.

In an internal memo seen by Business Insider, xAI president Michael Nicolls told staff that Kevin Holland, who has worked at SpaceX across two spells since 2013 and previously oversaw Starship work at Cape Canaveral, would lead the company’s AI compute buildout, tasked with “bringing up the next 6 phases of compute by end of year.” Two other senior SpaceX executives, Wesley Salandro and Alexandra Noe, will report to him. SpaceX and Holland did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

SpaceX, which merged with xAI in February, rents computing capacity from its two Colossus data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Southaven, Mississippi. Filings from the company’s June listing showed Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month for that capacity, and Google said it would pay $920 million a month. Elon Musk told employees that AI revenue more than tripled in the second quarter and that he expected it to overtake all other revenue sources by September.

Musk posted on X last week that SpaceX aimed to bring another 220,000 Nvidia AI chips online this week and could add a further 220,000 by late December “if we get lucky.” He has confirmed the company is building a third data center, called Minihard, near the Colossus sites.