'Might make it a little smaller': Trump claims coal is bomb-proof in widely mocked speech

President Donald Trump vowed to use coal to power future artificial intelligence endeavors because he said the energy source was bomb-proof.

In a Thursday speech at Davos, Trump falsely claimed he was the first to suggest locating artificial intelligence data centers near energy production facilities. The speech was widely ridiculed.

"So I'm going to give emergency declarations so that they can start building them almost immediately," the U.S. president vowed. "And I think it was largely my idea because nobody thought this was possible."

"But I told them that what I want you to do is build your electric generating plant right next to your plant as a separate building connected," he continued. "And they said, wow, you're kidding."

Trump said this would also be beneficial if the power grid were "taken out" by force.

"And they may have coal as a backup. Good, clean coal," he explained. "If there were a problem with a pipe coming in, as an example, you're going with gas, oil, and gas, and a pipe gets blown up or for some reason doesn't work, there are some companies in the U.S. that have coal sitting right by the plant so that if there's an emergency, they can go to that short-term basis and use our very clean coal."

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"So that's something else that a lot of people didn't even know about, but nothing can destroy coal, not the weather, not a bomb, nothing," Trump added. "It might make it a little smaller, might make it a little different shape, but coal is very strong as a backup."

One of the hazards of coal is that it can catch fire. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed an infrastructure bill that helped extinguish a coal fire burning for over 100 years in Colorado.

Ukrainian coal miners have also reportedly struggled with bombing by Russian forces.

"Accidents are common in Ukraine’s aging coal mines. Methane gas, a byproduct of coal mining, is highly explosive," The New York Timesnoted in 2022.

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