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Economy

Land pitched for housing targeted by Trump donor for AI data center instead.

A development firm with ties to Trump is eyeing Navy land for a 400-megawatt data center. Local leaders say they were blindsided.

Land pitched for housing targeted by Trump donor for AI data center instead.
Stock photo. Photo by İsmail Enes Ayhan on Unsplash

A piece of San Diego that city leaders have long eyed for homes could instead host what may become the largest data center in California. The developer behind the pitch gave $1 million to President Trump's first inauguration, and the people who represent the neighborhood say they were kept in the dark until they read about it in the news.

Manchester Financial Group, the development firm of hotel magnate Doug Manchester, is exploring a 400-megawatt data center on the Navy's 70-acre NAVWAR campus near Old Town, Voice of San Diego reported, based on emails it obtained. The site sits next to the Old Town Transit Center, the kind of transit-rich land housing advocates say the region should be building homes on.

From apartments to server racks

In January 2024, the Navy picked Manchester and Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate, one of the Clark Group's companies, as the potential master developer. Under the deal still being negotiated, the developers would build the Navy new facilities and, in exchange, get a 99-year lease on the rest of the land. Their 2024 project summary to the city floated thousands of apartments, potentially for military families, plus hotels, restaurants and retail.

"They showed me an entire portfolio of housing and park space and commercial real estate and job creation. That is what they promised the people of this community," Councilmember Marni von Wilpert, whose district includes the site, told FOX 5. "I found out in a newspaper article that they may be changing their mind."

The developers say nothing is final. "The potential plans for this site continue to be refined, and no final project has been approved," the project team said. CEO Ted Eldredge says the team has also considered a stadium, a hospital and a university campus, and that any final design "will be a mixed use development with homes as well as retail."

A hotel developer's data center bet

The emails show the data center idea has been moving for nearly a year. On Nov. 10, 2025, Eldredge asked San Diego Community Power what it would cost to power the project. By March, his firm had asked San Diego Gas & Electric for an engineering study of what the project would need from the grid.

None of this is the developers' usual business. "We're hotel developers," Eldredge told Voice of San Diego. "We're not in the data center space. We're just trying to figure out a lucrative way to build the Navy their building." No customer has committed.

A donor's history with Trump, and with the Navy

Manchester has done a Navy land swap before. In 2006, the Navy gave him a 99-year lease on 13.7 acres at the foot of Broadway in exchange for a new Navy headquarters. He sold the rest of that project for $230 million in 2020, Axios reported.

His ties to Trump run deep. Manchester gave $1 million to Trump's 2017 inaugural fund, CBS News reported, and the inaugural committee's donor filing lists a $1 million gift from the "Papa Doug Trust," tied to the chairman of Manchester Financial Group, according to The Fiscal Times. Trump then picked him to be ambassador to the Bahamas. In 2019, with the nomination stalled, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel emailed him asking for "$500,000 worth of contributions from your family." Manchester answered that his wife was sending $100,000, that after a committee vote "we need you to have the majority leader bring it to a majority vote," and that "Once confirmed, I our [sic] family will respond!" The RNC called his linking of future donations to an official action "totally inappropriate" and returned the money. The White House then asked him to withdraw, according to CBS, and he did.

A president all in on AI

Trump has made AI growth a signature cause. "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution," he told the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22. "We're going to encourage it, not rein it in."

In the same speech, he announced that U.S. government documents would stop saying "artificial intelligence." The word artificial, he said, "makes it sound fake and it is not fake." His new name is "super intelligence," which he said "sounds much better." Before the speech, "superior intelligence" had won at least one of the Truth Social polls he posted asking what to call it, Axios reported.

His policies back the words up. His July 2025 Executive Order 14318 directs the Secretary of Defense to "identify suitable sites on military installations" for data center infrastructure and tells agencies to find shortcuts around full environmental reviews. No reporting so far ties the order to NAVWAR.

Leaders say they were blindsided

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who sits on Community Power's board, said he asked agency leaders in April and again in May whether any data centers were in the pipeline and wasn't told about this one. "I'm quite bothered," he told Voice of San Diego. The city, he said, has "next to none if not literally no way of regulating what happens there," and the project is "happening in the context of a federal regime that is completely tone deaf as it relates to community concerns about data centers."

Rep. Scott Peters, whose district includes the campus, said he was "disturbed to read in the newspaper" about it. "A data center isn't neighborhood serving," he told KPBS. "It's not really something that belongs here."

Because the land is federal, the project doesn't need city permits or money from Congress, which leaves local leaders little leverage, KPBS reported. The Navy's updated environmental impact statement is due in 2027.

Who wins, who loses

The winners are the developer and whichever tech company buys the computing power. At the high end of Community Power's estimate, the electricity alone would cost more than $1 million a day. Elo-Rivera said he understands 400 megawatts to be the equivalent of 300,000 homes. "It'd be like dropping San Francisco into the middle of San Diego, in terms of energy use," he told FOX 5. The developers told Community Power it was "unlikely" the center would run on 100 percent renewable power, and that there would be backup power on site. Asked about local jobs and union labor, they wrote: "TBD."

The losers are working families priced out of one of the country's most strained housing markets, and ratepayers who fear they'll be stuck paying for grid upgrades. "The idea that we would be adding cost to the consumer so that a billionaire could build a data center is something I think most San Diegans would be offended by," Elo-Rivera said.

We think public land next to a transit hub belongs to the working families who need homes, and a developer who can write a president a $1 million check has a kind of access those families will never get. The Navy took public comments on its 2021 draft review. When the updated one comes out, tell the Navy what you want built there.

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