The anti-data center campaign is being driven and amplified by America’s foreign adversaries, and it is working. 

According to recent polling, roughly three-quarters of Americans oppose construction of AI data centers: the physical infrastructure powering America’s technology sector and, increasingly, a major pillar of its economic strength. Concerns range from electricity and water consumption to land use, noise, and doubts about the local economic benefits these projects promise. China is watching, and laughing. 

A report by Sam Lyman, a former senior adviser and chief speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and AI researcher who now leads research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), found that American groups with ties to the Chinese Communist Party have helped coordinate campaigns hampering the United States' AI progress. The report attributes 10 data-center moratoria, one permanent data-center ban, and four rejected or abandoned AI projects to these efforts already, as well as continued activist campaigns against new data center projects. 

Meanwhile, China has used America’s self-imposed delays to justify accelerating the expansion of its own AI infrastructure.

According to Lyman, Shanghai-based U.S. expatriate Neville Roy Singham and organizations affiliated with his network—including Tricontinental, People’s Dispatch, the People’s Forum, and CodePink, have promoted narratives that align neatly with Beijing’s interest in slowing America’s AI buildout. They oppose export controls that could constrain Chinese AI development, while supporting domestic policies that constrain American AI development. A remarkably convenient definition of “AI safety.”

Recommended
NBC Tried to Do Major Damage Control for Abdul El-Sayed. Tim Scott Shut It Down. Matt Vespa The DSA Promises Its Revolution Will Be a Violent One Amy Curtis

The report also cites a Food & Water Watch-led letter, signed by more than 230 groups in late 2025, demanding a national pause on new AI data centers. Lyman’s report argues that numerous signatories were connected to advocacy networks receiving foreign-linked funding. Those demands then closely resembled the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, which would halt the construction or expansion of qualifying AI data centers until Congress enacts a broad set of federal safety, labor, environmental, consumer-cost, and community-approval mandates.

The overlap becomes still more troubling given that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s April 2026 Senate AI panel included Zeng Yi and Xue Lan, two Chinese AI-governance figures, who are quite prominent in Chinese state media. 

In other words, China has helped convince Americans that their own technological and economic future is somehow bad for them, transforming a country once defined by innovation, risk-taking, and builders into a nation of would-be Luddites.

What should have remained a local debate over genuinely limited resources has metastasized into a bipartisan push for state and federal overregulation and moratoria. Some Republicans who barely trust government to pave a road now seem convinced it will somehow get data-center policy exactly right. 

That is especially frustrating because the evidence undercuts much of the panic. AI data centers often use far less water than critics claim, support lower electricity costs through new generation and grid investment, increase local property values, reduce tax burdens, and deliver substantial economic benefits. In many communities, they are the modern equivalent of the manufacturing plants towns and cities once depended on. Yet the facts have struggled to compete with the fear.

How this fight develops remains uncertain. What is abundantly certain is that America cannot afford to get it wrong. If we choose to block the infrastructure behind the next industrial revolution, we will not merely cede an advantage to China; we will export the jobs, investment, innovation, and opportunity that should have strengthened American communities. The cost would reach far beyond Silicon Valley. It would show up in fewer high-paying jobs, slower wage growth, smaller local tax bases, diminished national security, and an economy increasingly dependent on technology built somewhere else. 

America’s prosperity, and the global leadership too many take for granted, was built by people willing to build. It will not survive a country determined to stop them.