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 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.
‘Data Center Bandwagon’
Part of the regime’s effort is about harnessing U.S. artificial intelligence against itself.
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.
One comic features a family of three saying “This is unfair!” while glaring at a man in a suit puffing a cigar and clutching bags full of cash, a June OpenAI report found. A set of likely fake accounts then amplified such materials on social media.
OpenAI dubbed the effort the “Data Center Bandwagon campaign.”
Chinese influence operators are “testing narratives against AI infrastructure—a foundation of U.S. technological leadership, economic growth, and the broader democratic AI ecosystem,” the company said in its report.
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 wrote 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.
Sowing Discord
Running alongside the covert cyber operations is a more overt propaganda push.In recent months, Chinese state media have carried dozens of articles—in English and Chinese—describing 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. At a May policy event, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum 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.
‘Tell Half a Story’
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.”
—Eva Fu; Sean Tseng; Stacy Robinson
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—Stacy Robinson
