Americans are finally uniting for a cause. From Bernie Sanders to a newly converted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, everyone, it seems, is against the construction and operation of computer data centers.
But is this a true grassroots movement, or are foreign bots stirring things up?
Utah has 48 operating data centers, and most of them popped up without much attention. That all changed during this summer when the Stratos Project was introduced in Box Elder County, near the expanding shores of the water-starved Great Salt Lake. The public rose up in opposition. Politicians ran for their political lives. Utah’s longtime Senate President Stuart Adams lost his primary election at least in part, presumably, because of his support for the center.
Political kryptonite
Now, suddenly, data centers have, according to Bloomberg, gone “from a niche local issue to a defining topic ahead of the November midterm elections.” From coast to coast, they have become political kryptonite.
But is the opposition real, or are Americans being led by the nose by foreign social media propaganda?
The question is not new. It’s been raised by various people, including media personality and investor Kevin O’Leary, who is tied to the Box Elder project. In July, two Utahns sued him for defamation because he alleged they had ties to China.
The Deseret News explored China’s alleged involvement in data center discussions more than a month ago, noting, “This claim is enormously difficult to verify, due to donation-reporting loopholes, layered financial structures, shell companies and straw donors, all of which disconnect the giver from their money.”
An X investigation
But now it has come up again, thanks to a claim by investigators with the social media company X, who posted toward the end of August, “We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”
These were Chinese accounts. The X global government affairs post continued: “These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public’s expense.”
Americans, then, may not be knowingly helping the Chinese, but they may be unwittingly influenced by the arguments.
None of this helps the truth get any easier to verify. All it does is add new layers. X is owned by Elon Musk. He wants to put data centers in outer space. As the Deseret News reported, wealthy Europeans also have helped fund American environmental groups that oppose data centers.
Who knew information was going to be so complicated in the information age?
The skeptics
Not everyone is on board with these worries. In a recent essay for Forbes, contributor John Tamny said he isn’t buying any of it. For one thing, China’s most popular artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, is strongly rooted in the U.S. market. Why, he wondered, would China sabotage itself in a prosperous market by scuttling the data centers necessary for AI?
“The more McDonald’s there are in China, and the more DeepSeeks, SHEINs, and TikToks that are thriving in the U.S., the better and more prosperous the world is,” Tamny wrote.
That makes sense on one level, but governments, and particularly those with more or less controlled economies, do not always act logically. Otherwise, Russia might have decided to trade more freely with Ukraine rather than to attack it.
It’s time for a reality check.
Despite all these questions about who is influencing who and what’s really real, there is little doubt the United States and China are in a race to dominate AI. Also, despite what critics or voters may say, the technology can’t be bottled up and thrown away any more than nuclear bombs, and the knowledge of how to build them cannot be erased. It is here to stay, and abdicating leadership to a foreign power does not make sense.
Still, a Utah poll by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, conducted in May by Morning Consult, found 53% of Utah voters opposing the Box Elder data center, while 7 in 10 voters said economic benefits of data centers don’t outweigh environmental impacts.
The environmental concerns are important and need to be addressed. So are concerns that AI bots may kill us all.
But the sudden nationwide movement against artificial intelligence and the data centers needed to run it may be something Americans come to regret.