There is a hearing in a middle school gymnasium in a small, unknown county. A crowd has gathered before a folding table with three zoning commissioners. A woman in the fourth row holds a utility bill that has been folded and unfolded so often that the crease has softened. She is not a crank, but her bill has gone up, and she wants to know why a company worth more than her state’s annual budget needs 400 acres to build a substation next to her son’s school.
That is a real question, and it deserves a real answer. Data centers are deliberately ugly, and, understandably, no one wants them near their home. However, there are other points to consider in the race against communist China: who will influence decisions based on the answers AI provides.
Here is what she did not know that night. On August 27, X’s safety team said it had identified a suspected Chinese bot farm of roughly 200,000 inauthentic accounts and that about 200 of them were posting content disparaging American data centers “in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”1 The posts echoed the two notes she had been hearing all summer: your power bill, your grid.2
These 200 accounts had enough influence to prompt enough people to argue against them for the wrong reasons and stall the development of new data centers.
A researcher found that many of those accounts had no followers and generated essentially no engagement with public opinion.3 Beijing didn’t move the needle because it didn’t have to. The bots aren’t the campaign. They are what Beijing does: a cheap, clumsy signal of what a rival government would like Americans to spend the next five years arguing about. Sadly, a sufficient share of public opinion is obliging.
The Five Years We Are Spending
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, local opposition delayed or killed about 75 U.S. data center projects, representing roughly $130 billion in capital, the worst quarter on record.4 Tulsa froze new hyperscale construction, and New Orleans passed a full-year moratorium.5 Multiply that by every small-town referendum on data centers.
Here is a look at the other side of the ledger. China has built 42 intelligent computing clusters and national computing-center electricity consumption has reached 170 billion kilowatt-hours.6 Beijing’s energy plan now treats data centers as a way to absorb its surplus renewable generation.7 They are not debating whether data centers are worth the footprint.
What Data Centers Actually Buy
A data center is not a warehouse of blinking lights. It is the factory where the answers to AI are created — the answers to inquiries by a student in Lagos, a clerk in Jakarta, or a nurse in Lima. Whoever runs the cheapest capable AI model becomes the world’s default arbiter of truth, and communist China will provide anything but that.
That race is already going the wrong way. Chinese models now account for 41 percent of monthly downloads on Hugging Face AI, surpassing American models for the first time. Alibaba’s Qwen became the most-downloaded open model on Earth, with more than three billion cumulative downloads.
And these models carry their warped view of reality. One report found that DeepSeek failed to provide a true evaluation in 81 percent of probes on the real situation of the oppression in the Chinese areas of Tiananmen, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. A U.S. government review concluded that Chinese models track communist Beijing’s talking points and grow more censored with each release.8
Then came the world’s first Artificial Intelligence institution. In July, Xi announced the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. Twenty-nine countries, including Russia, signed on9 with free models, trained workforces and a standards body to certify them all, provided by China.10
Propaganda used to require a printing press, a translator or a shortwave transmitter. Now all it requires is a database filled with information, an algorithm to determine what to say and somebody’s electricity.
The Discount Nobody Mentioned
None of this makes the woman in the fourth row wrong about the local referendum. Ratepayers should not silently accept large data centers, water rights abuse or unreasonable noise. Communities are owed real terms in writing and a share of what is built on their ground.
But it is crucial to understand the trade being offered. Every moratorium is a decision about the capacity to deliver accurate information, and capacity is a decision about whose answer arrives first. By simply failing to show the advantages of data centers, they keep American computing out of the world market.
Leading the world by offering the truth versus propaganda is a legitimate debate. Just notice who else is voting on this—and notice they stopped debating and started pouring concrete.
Photo Credit: © Grispb– stock.adobe.com
Footnotes
- https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backlash-bots
- https://www.techspot.com/news/113658-x-busts-200000-strong-chinese-bot-farm-including.html
- https://www.businessinsider.com/x-chinese-bots-data-center-debate-no-engagement-followers-2026-8
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/data-center-opposition-sharply-rising-2026-study-finds-rcna349728
- https://www.interconnectedcapital.com/research/data-center-moratoriums
- https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362003.shtml
- https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2026/07/are-data-centers-the-solution-to-chinas-renewables-excess-capacity
- https://www.tradingview.com/news/reuters.com,2025:newsml_L1N3T60Y2:0-us-scrutinizes-chinese-ai-for-ideological-bias-memo-shows
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/china-led-ai-body-enlists-global-south-states-to-rival-us
- https://idsa.in/publisher/issuebrief/chinas-ai-diplomacy-and-the-global-south