Welcome to the first edition of Power Play! From now until the midterms, senior writer Molly Taft will be sharing their thoughts every Sunday on this political season’s hottest issue: data centers. We welcome reader comments, and will be answering questions from the comments section in future editions.
Be sure to catch WIRED’s first livestream on data centers this Thursday, September 10, featuring Molly, senior politics correspondent Hugo Lowell, and senior business writer Max Zeff! You can submit questions here.
It’s been a rough summer for data center boosters. Polling is getting even more dismal—as many as 75 percent of Americans now say they would oppose a data center being built in their area, up from 42 percent last year. Politicians from both parties who were previously advocates, like Texas governor Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, are now switching up as the midterms approach, looking to convey to voters that they’re talking a hard line on the hated infrastructure.
But while some Republicans are turning tail on the issue even in the face of President Donald Trump’s vigorous support for data center construction, others are joining prominent tech leaders in doubling down on an old narrative: That China is responsible for all this malaise.
In late August, X announced that it had identified 200 accounts linked to China that were helping to spread anti-data center talking points on the platform, causing a flurry of alarmist headlines and tweets. (“China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage,” Axios trumpeted in an article on X’s report, which data center-friendly politicians and right-wing figures amplified using X itself.) Even the president joined in: “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” he wrote in a Truth Social post defending data centers (“let Data Reign!”) made just a few days after the X report.
The idea that Americans hate data centers because of a nebulous foreign influence operation—not because of a slew of environmental worries, an oligarch-friendly political system, or a general resistance to AI—is a handy excuse for the technology’s backers and their allies. And it’s one that’s been hanging around for a few months. In the spring, a handful of reports from right-wing policy shops were used by lawmakers and pundits alike to point fingers at the Chinese Communist Party for purportedly seeding anti-data center narratives among the American public. In June, OpenAI banned a cluster of users it had found that, the company said, were linked to the Chinese government and “testing narratives against AI infrastructure.”
But claims that Americans hate data centers because of Chinese influence are based on pretty thin evidence. The biggest report circulating around DC claiming foreign influence, China experts told me earlier this year, leans heavily on insinuations and assumptions with precious little hard evidence. In its own report from June, OpenAI acknowledged that the cluster of accounts it identified was simply exploiting existing discontent around data centers. It’s possible X’s recent purge may be linked to the accounts flagged by OpenAI: They use similar hashtags and images, and several link to the same obscure local news article. X ultimately identified 200,000 accounts in the same bot farm; the 200 anti-data center accounts were just a drop in the larger bucket.
Do blue-check tech types and Republicans keep hammering on the China angle because they know something that the public doesn’t? Graphika, a social media analytics firm that has been tracking data center sentiment online, told me in June that most of the opposition they had seen thus far was homegrown. That hasn’t changed: There’s still very little evidence of significant foreign intervention, Tyler Williams, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, told me this week.