China Didn't Make People Hate Data Centers

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Right-wing officials and data center investors are increasingly claiming that data center protests are being funded and influenced by the Chinese government. OpenAI added to the discourse on Wednesday when it released a report describing a cluster of accounts originating in China that, the company said, had been spreading anti-data center messages on social media.

Experts who spoke to WIRED, however, are skeptical of the funding claims. They also say that it’s likely that any foreign interference is simply adding on to existing tensions over data centers and AI in the US.

Local opposition to data centers in the US has skyrocketed in recent months. A poll released last week from climate outlet Heatmap shows that more than half of Americans support a moratorium on data center development. Separate polling released in early June from UK-based policy research agency Public First shows that support for data centers in the US was the lowest of 15 countries surveyed.

The meme that Beijing is funding data center opposition has picked up steam in Washington, DC in recent weeks. On Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking for an investigation into foreign influence “led by the Chinese Communist Party” to manipulate public opinion. He's not the only one: Republican leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a separate letter to the White House and the FBI last week expressing concerns about foreign campaigns targeting data center development,. Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox Business last month that places trying to build data centers are “getting bombarded” with foreign propaganda.

Data center developers have also been quick to deploy these ideas. Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary, who’s developing a massive and controversial data center in Utah, used a graphic from a recent report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a cryptocurrency advocacy organization, in a May video claiming that foreign influence was fueling opposition to his project.

Graphika, a social media analytics company, has been tracking data center opposition across several social platforms, including Facebook, Bluesky, and TikTok for the past year.

Dina Sadek, an analyst at Graphika, says in a statement that the company has “not yet seen evidence of organized or scaled influence operations or campaigns that can be traced back to a foreign actor,” with two notable exceptions. One is a “cross-platform network of accounts” using AI-generated avatars that comment on a wide variety of social issues, and that “sporadically” mention US tech companies. The other exception, Sadek says, is some Facebook pages producing anti-data center images generated with AI. Those pages, Sadek says, often have administrators based in Bangladesh, and may only exist “for monetization purposes.”

"Our ongoing research indicates that domestic US actors are leading the online anti-data center conversation,” Sadek says.

OpenAI’s report includes ChatGPT-generated anti-data center images that the company says were used as a campaign “to amplify existing public concerns about energy prices and local impacts of data center development.” But the company notes that it “found no evidence of meaningful breakout” of the anti-data center messaging from the accounts it flagged.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute report O’Leary cited is one of the key sources of right-wing claims about Chinese influence. The report, which House Republicans also referenced in their letter, alleges that a tangle of nonprofit funding connects popular anti-data center efforts to foreign funders, including the Chinese Communist Party.

The report also says Chinese state media is “openly campaigning against US AI data centers.” As evidence it cites stories and videos about the anti-data center trend and rising energy costs, both topics that American and other international outlets have published countless stories on.

Sam Lyman, the head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and the author of the report, said that he first started looking into the issue following a public AI safety conversation hosted in April between Senator Bernie Sanders about the need for international cooperation with four experts, including two from China.

“It was such an obvious psyop,” he says of the event.

However, experts on China and AI who spoke to WIRED were skeptical of the report’s claims that Beijing is directly and intentionally involved in the US data center discourse. Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, points out that high-level discussions between US and Chinese officials and experts have happened at other points in the recent past around similarly pressing global issues, like climate change. (Xue Lan, one of the speakers at the Sanders event singled out by the report, is a nonresident fellow at Brookings.)

“If you're looking for prominent people from China who can speak about [AI], they are going to be the very people who would be in contact with and providing advice to the Chinese government—especially in academia, where there's a lot of back and forth between academic experts and advising the government on policymaking,” Chan says. “The framing of it can certainly sound ominous, but almost by definition, you would want people who matter in the Chinese AI debate to be there.”

Graham Webster, a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, says that the report calls out actions and signs that don’t match other documented cases of known Chinese influence campaigns, especially when it comes to coverage in state media like China Daily, an English-language newspaper.

“You see US media covering these types of data center discourses,” he says. “It’s totally normal for the English language Chinese media to pick up storylines that are in the US media. It’s just how wire services work.”

Both Chan and Webster stressed that there have been instances in the past of Chinese actors intentionally amplifying other social issues organically causing unrest in the US—protests around the genocide in Gaza, for instance. Similarly, Lyman of the Bitcoin Policy Institute acknowledges that local communities “have legitimate questions and concerns” about AI and data center development.

Even if much of the opposition in the US began organically, there’s a strong chance that foreign actors could intervene sooner rather than later.

“The targeting of OpenAI and US data center buildouts is significant not because the operation appears to have shifted public opinion, but because it shows PRC-origin influence operators testing narratives against AI infrastructure,” the OpenAI report notes.

Chan, of the Brookings Institute, says that the OpenAI report is “part of a broader pattern of Chinese state media and connected actors amplifying legitimate social grievances in the US to make the US look bad.

“I'd be cautious in estimating the impact of these efforts before seeing more evidence, but it is something worth tracking,” he says.