Data Center Gaslighting: Blaming Foreign Actors for Real Resistance
If you’re among the many Americans opposed to having a data center dropped in your neighborhood, you might be doing the bidding of foreign actors and leftist billionaires. This is the latest narrative emerging from data center advocates.
Earlier this month, three congressional legislators sent a letter to the director of the FBI and the leaders of President Donald Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology asking them to look into “foreign influence campaigns targeting [AI] development in the U.S.” Republican Reps. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, John Joyce of Pennsylvania, and Bob Latta of Ohio signed the letter. None of them has a freedom score of above 74 percent in The New American’s Freedom Index. Guthrie, who has been in Congress since 2010, has managed to obey the Constitution an average of 59 percent of the time when casting votes. He is also the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Legislators who have a difficult time obeying the U.S. Constitution may not be the best judges of policy in general.
Lawmakers’ Letter
In the letter, the lawmakers ask for a meeting with Trump administration officials to convince them to take action against the “foreign influence campaigns and ‘billionaire-backed activism’ to slow U.S. AI development.” There is no mention of which billionaires they’re referring to, but they’re likely talking about George Soros. On Monday, The Daily Wire published the article “The Hidden Soros Connection In America’s Data Center Wars.” The Daily Wire claims that a large anti-data center Facebook group “is being channeled by Democratic operatives linked to Soros-funded organizations — and is part of an openly stated effort to turn local frustration over data centers into votes and candidates for the Left.”
The congressional letter cites reports by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) and Power the Future (PTF) as the basis for lawmakers’ concerns. One part of the letter appears to align almost perfectly with The Daily Wire’s narrative about Soros influence. “Equally sinister,” the letter says, “PTF’s report details how billionaire donors filter money through a complex financial web to fund America’s non-profit ecosystem — often with strong political or ideological leanings — to skew public opinion against the buildout of AI data center infrastructure.”
The lawmakers also claim that an axis of adversaries are ginning up opposition to AI centers in the United States:
According to BPI, “international actors are working through state media organizations, nonprofit networks, and dark money groups to shape US policy and public opinion on artificial intelligence.” BPI finds that this is accomplished across three main vectors of influence: (1) foreign state media; (2) CCP-aligned Singham network; and (3) foreign-billionaire funding. These findings also track with recent reporting documenting an increase in coordinated efforts by China, Russia, and Iran to undermine the buildout of U.S. data center capacity through “propaganda outlets.”
In their letter, the lawmakers cite PTF’s comparison of data center opposition to radical lefists’ environmental activism of the past.
The Sources
PTF is a 501(c)(4) organization founded in 2018 by Daniel Turner. Before heading the group, Turner was the communications director at the Charles Koch Institute. The treasurer of PTF is Charles Gantt, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Others in PTF leadership roles include Richard Whitbeck, a former state director for Rep. Nick Begich (R-Alaska), and Larry Behrens, who worked as the communications director for former New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez.
BPI is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing Bitcoin, not surprisingly. Its leadership is filled with Bitcoin enthusiasts. David Zell is the president, Grant McCarty is the executive director, and Conner Brown is the managing director. Management also includes former CIA agent Ken Egan as head of government affairs and former Orrin Hatch speechwriter Sam Lyman as head of research. Lyman authored a 17-page report for BPI titled “Foreign Influence in the Campaign Against American AI.” It appears to serve as the basis for the letter lawmakers sent to Trump officials and the FBI.
Billionaires’ Exploitation?
Are leftist billionaires exploiting Americans’ resistance to data centers for political means? It would make less sense if they weren’t. Does America’s primary global adversary have an interest in slowing down AI development? Yes, that makes sense. AI is indeed the next arms race. But are those the only legitimate gauges to determine if plopping data centers every few miles all over America is a good thing? And are we being told the truth about this aggressive data center push?
There are several legitimate reasons Americans are showing up to local government meetings to fume against data centers. There are good reasons they’re passing local ordinances to ban them. For starters, people don’t want their electricity rates to rise. Data centers — not China and not George Soros — have been known to trigger rate hikes.
The centers also generate noise, and people who live near them have developed sleeping disorders. One news report featured a man in Virginia who was so desperate to dampen the noise that he put padding on his walls and moved his sleeping quarters to the basement. Yet he still kept hearing the humming. Now he’s thinking about moving. China has nothing to do with that.
Data centers also require lots of water for cooling, and in some parts of the country, specifically the West, water is too valuable a resource to take from people. People are opposed to that. Farmers out West have been fighting over water rights for decades.
These are concerns spurred by experience and local circumstances, not foreign social media campaigns. Perhaps they’re magnified by malevolent actors, but they’re real issues that would exist even if there were no Soros or China to speak of.
And there is one more concern, something with more sinister implications.
The New Arms Race
The story we’re being told is that AI is essentially an arms race with China. And what good American would ever want China to prevail? The government has framed it this way, entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary said during an appearance on Tucker Carlson. It’s the story the public will get whenever we resist, but let’s consider the context.
The U.S. already has more data centers than every other country in the world, by far — eight times more than every other country. Depending on which database you look at, the United States has more than 4,000 of them. Some sources have that number past 5,000. Germany comes in at a distant second with just over 500, followed closely by the United Kingdom. China is in third, with somewhere between 369 and 449, and Russia has about 200.
When Carlson confronted O’Leary with this factoid, the Shark Tank co-host said it’s not the number of data centers that matters, but how powerful they are. And China, he said, was building larger, more powerful data centers. But the truth is the United States has a large edge in high-performance workloads as well.
Given that America is already way ahead in computing power, why force these things on the people, especially at the cost of our standard of living and depletion of natural resources?
What’s the Real Agenda?
Some sources say that AI will account for up to 70 percent of data center computing by 2030. We know Big Tech and governments use AI to gather information on people and create more efficient surveillance tools, and they have ambitions of essentially integrating everything in a digital grid. As we’ve reported numerous times, globalists want to create digital ID systems, to replace physical money with digital currency, and to replace physical voting and paper ballots with online-only voting. Our June print issue covers the many concerning aspects about the digital infrastructure Big Tech and the international oligarchy aim to build. We highly recommend that.
What if the main agenda behind these data centers isn’t to beat China, but to build an inescapable digital prison for the world? And what if the United States is the warden’s office of that prison?
