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Posted on 08/07/2026 9:58:14 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
As small towns across the United States reckon with power-hungry data centers springing up, the Chinese Communist Party is muddying the waters and sowing division.
By tapping into the tensions around water usage, power demands, and environmental costs, the regime is trying to widen the wedge using an old playbook: influence peddling and propaganda.
There’s no discounting the groundswell of anger in American towns about data centers in their neighborhoods. Local resistance has blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects, worth some $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026, according to Data Center Watch.
But while analysts caution against categorically dismissing all opposition against data centers as Beijing’s work, they say the potential risk of the regime meddling behind the scenes is nonetheless serious—and growing.
Whether it’s energy or water, each is “definitely a real issue,” Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Epoch Times. “But it’s also a real issue that the Chinese Communist Party is perfectly happy to exacerbate to create even more division with the goal not of leading to any solution, but of paralyzing the United States,” she said.
Using virtual private networks, or VPNs, Chinese operators tapped into ChatGPT, which is not accessible in China. They instructed the chatbot to create English-language comic strips and comments that suggested AI center construction was hiking up electricity costs for average American households.
Keeping an edge on AI has been imperative for the Chinese regime. Its 15th five-year plan, adopted in March, pushes to integrate AI in all sectors of the economy. In a speech on July 17, Chinese leader Xi Jinping laid out another global AI order, in which China will take the lead in training and collaborating on the technology for developing countries.
The Chinese authorities see AI as a “battle,” said retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham, who authored the book “When China Attacks” to warn about the Chinese regime’s gray zone tactics.
“They want to win it, and they want to defeat us,” Newsham told The Epoch Times. And defeating means ensuring the United States falls behind them, and ideally, is dependent on them, he said.
Newsham pointed to green energy as a case study.
The world’s shift to clean energy has led to heavy dependence on China, which produces around 80 percent of the world’s solar modules and batteries and 70 percent of wind turbine equipment. The refining process for several key electric vehicle batteries largely takes place in China.
Now, the Chinese regime wants to achieve the same thing with AI, Newsham said.
Beijing is not looking for quick results, said Scott McGregor, a former intelligence adviser to Canadian federal law enforcement.
“It’s very incremental,” he told The Epoch Times. Volume matters, and AI is enabling Chinese influence campaigns at scale, said Nicolas Chaillan, a cybersecurity expert and former Air Force chief software officer.
“If you become the noise and you have the volume with you, then you can control the narrative, and then you can really push your thoughts into people’s minds,” he told The Epoch Times. “The more volume it has, the more it’s repeated, the more people are going to believe it.”
In recent months, Chinese state media have carried dozens of articles—in English and Chinese—taunting U.S. buildout roadblocks while boasting China’s successful AI expansion. Many of them echo the same talking points as the fake social media accounts.
This pattern appears to have caught the attention of Washington. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, at a May policy event, suggested that some of the activism against data centers is driven by “foreign source dark money coming in.”
“It’s not organic or local,” he said.
Several Republican lawmakers have pointed to a network funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman living in Shanghai who has parroted Beijing’s talking points. Singham is now under federal grand jury investigation over potential unlawful money funneling.
Neville Roy Singham (R), founder of ThoughtWorks, attends an event at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Feb. 14, 2018. Singham, who lives in Shanghai and has parroted Beijing’s talking points, is now under federal grand jury investigation over alleged unlawful money funneling.
“China would like to dominate the future of artificial intelligence, and it is clear that they are actively seeking to exploit Americans’ legitimate concerns and sow discord in our own backyard for one purpose, and that is to seize this technological advantage for themselves,” Smith, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a June congressional hearing on Chinese influence.
He vowed to “follow the money and get to the bottom of the dark web of funding sources.”
In late July, Smith subpoenaed three Singham-associated nonprofits, citing tens of millions of dollars funneled through Singham.
Some of the opposition voices said their core issue is a lack of transparency from the government.
Residents “want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come,” Elizabeth Hutchings, communications manager of Alliance for a Better Utah, told The Epoch Times. The group has fought a major data center project in the state and denies any foreign hand in its work.
Lawmakers and experts say true community-led opposition and the Chinese influence campaigns are two distinct issues.
“There’s a place for legitimate concerns about data centers and AI, but let’s have that debate separate from the malign influence by the Chinese Communist Party,” David Shedd, former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Epoch Times.
In late July, Smith subpoenaed three Singham-associated nonprofits, citing tens of millions of dollars funneled through Singham.
Some of the opposition voices said their core issue is a lack of transparency from the government.
Residents “want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come,” Elizabeth Hutchings, communications manager of Alliance for a Better Utah, told The Epoch Times. The group has fought a major data center project in the state and denies any foreign hand in its work.
Lawmakers and experts say true community-led opposition and the Chinese influence campaigns are two distinct issues.
“There’s a place for legitimate concerns about data centers and AI, but let’s have that debate separate from the malign influence by the Chinese Communist Party,” David Shedd, former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Epoch Times.
The Chinese regime, he said, has “every vested interest” in sowing discord.
McGregor agreed, saying the regime is trying to catch up on AI, and it will want to slow the United States down in any way it can.
Singham couldn’t be reached for comment.
Exploiting friction points in open societies is a familiar tactic for the Chinese regime.
When the United States grappled with anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021, Beijing saw an opportunity to divert attention away from human rights abuses in its own country. Its diplomats and state media accused the United States of hypocrisy and boasted that the Chinese version of governance was better.
“They tell half a story, or they change the story enough so that it corrodes the truth,” Stephen Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies at Tokyo’s International Christian University, told The Epoch Times.
“These are patterns that are only accentuated and put on steroids with AI.”
Ethan Tu’s Taiwan AI Labs has used AI to track coordinated influence operations. In most cases, he said, the operators aim to wear down public trust and push both sides to the extreme until there’s no room for objective conversation.
Beijing—by far the most capable competitor in this space—is running a “multifaceted, national-level strategy” to displace the United States as the world’s most influential AI power, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a 2025 report.
A number of lawmakers said they were concerned.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States is “absolutely dealing with Chinese influence” on the AI front. “At a local level in the United States of America, we’re not run by Washington, D.C. Each community gets to go out there and make their own decision about what they see as fits well within their communities,” he told The Epoch Times. “That’s our system of governance at the lowest possible level. But yes, we are absolutely dealing with Chinese influence on that front, because it benefits them for us to not have compute.”
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), like Smith, backed the grand jury investigation of Singham. He said the regime doesn’t “belong anywhere in our American political debates.”
These are “important local political debates that often involve local and state laws and policies, and the Chinese shouldn’t meddle in those debates,” he told The Epoch Times. “So we should crack down on them for it, and be fully aware of their motivations.”
If China achieves its goal, the threat to the United States and other democracies will be “existential,” said Kerry Gershaneck, a National Chengchi University professor who has closely studied Chinese political warfare operations.
The Chinese communist rulers are “already far ahead of any other country in weaponizing AI,” he told The Epoch Times. Combine that with a “massive global data-collection ecosystem,” he said, and the regime would have the ultimate tool to export its totalitarian model and “destroy us from within.”
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The big lie I see a lot is water use. The AI systems in the USA are closed loop and recycle their water like a car radiator.
And yet people (even here in FR) keep repeating the Chinese propaganda.
If you want to complain about Chinese propaganda then you better get your facts correct first:
https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961
The issue is way more complicated than you presented it—and varies widely by specific data center.
The agitation against data centers seems senseless to me. We already spend vastly more water on farming, residential lawns and golf courses than we ever will on all the data centers that we can build for the next century. I saw a number that California almond growers by themselves consume exponentially more water than all US data centers put together.
Falun Gong anti-chinese propaganda.
Most opposition to data centers is organic, domestic, and justified.
yep its AI so its all scary!
“Most opposition to data centers is organic, domestic, and justified.”
Correct.
Every community should review any proposal with a fine tooth comb—with the best experts they can assemble.
The OP is “poisoning the well”.
If he tried that stunt in his local community they might build a stock outside the town/city hall just for him.
I have to confess, I don’t understand all the consternation about data centers.
All of a sudden, data centers are in the news. We are hearing how they consume so much water and power, that many localities do not want data centers.
My lack of knowledge is based on, how the internet and cell phones as we know them have been around for decades. They have operated without all these massive data centers. Yet we are hearing that we are constructing all these new data centers, and they consume too much water and power.
Why are we suddenly apparently building enormous infrastructure of data centers? What is their function?
Who is paying for this? Internet companies, cell phone companies, government?
With all I’ve heard about data centers, I still clearly do not understand why this has become controversial, why we are needing data centers, who is building them for what purpose, etc. etc.
Any Freepers out there who can educate me, please do so. I’m lost as to what’s going on with this subject.
“ If you want to complain about Chinese propaganda then you better get your facts correct first”
Says the troll with TDS who constantly posts garbage.
At least we know who you work for now. Thanks for outing yourself. I was thinking you were just a rando antisemite.
I know how the systems work because one of the many companies I own makes pressure vessels. Traditionally we’ve sold them to the petroleum industry but now we’re also selling them to AI centers. They are literally closed loop and recycle their water. Use less water than a big swimming pool that looses a couple inches to evaporation daily.
Spread your ChiCom agitprop elsewhere.
Your posts are classic “poisoning the well”.
What is “poisoning the well”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
“Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say”
In your case you are trying to suggest that anyone who raises any issues about data centers is a Chinese agent of some sort.
Just try that kind of discourse in a public hearing—and watch what happens to you next.
What is your take on Elon Musk’s plan to take data centers to space, to run on solar power, without water, so as to eliminate the hassles of getting permits on Earth?
I am not a fan of Hopium—see too much of it around here.
I use AI enabled apps, devices and chatbots quite often. But the type of usage that I engage in is not what is typically consuming massive amounts of energy and yes, water in this country.
The real power and compute hungry customers are the government and businesses keeping track of huge amounts of data along with spending habits of millions of people and analyzing this massive amount of data to predict who pays how much for the same services. This is how data brokers and large retailers are making AI a profitable (for them) endeavor.
The people who are spreading propaganda on this forum are people who have very little actual knowledge of how AI is currently being used and the types and amount of resources that various activities consume. The sums currently being spent on the AI data center build-out are not justifiable in any meaningful analysis. Because of changed in the architecture of computer usage and design the vast majority of data centers will be obsolete shortly after construction is complete.
One thing that is not mentioned in the article is that the Chinese have spent and are spending less than 1/20th of what US based businesses have spent and are spending on AI Data Centers. And although I have subscribed to the Epoch Times for years... their articles often have a slant that sometimes can be misleading.
One problem that we have in the US is that corporations typically are relying on power companies passing on increased costs for their services resulting from massive infrastructure expenditures on to local consumers. This is effectively corporate welfare plain and simple.
“The sums currently being spent on the AI data center build-out are not justifiable in any meaningful analysis. Because of changed in the architecture of computer usage and design the vast majority of data centers will be obsolete shortly after construction is complete.”
That is my read as well.
Good post.
The maximum annual use of the roughly 20 data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, is about 1 billion gallons a year.
To put that in context, the flow of the Potomac river through Loudoun County Virginia is about 2.2 trillion gallons a year, or about 2,200 times the billion gallons a year used by the data centers.
It is a nothingburger.
Yep.
power hungry data centers vs power hungry humans.
The “Action Network” of 12,000 leftist ground game groups has as part of its member organizations and voter databases who is fearful of those big bad data centers in Red areas and can be used to reduce the Red margin in statewide races.
It is interesting that you consider the data-center expenditures to be non-nonsensical. Others have stated such.
Such things can happen. They are pretty rare. Time will tell.
My understanding of the data center construction is they are built to be constantly upgraded as new chips are made available.
non-nonsensical should be nonsensical. Sorry.
Just so.
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