Opposition to building data centres has hit a new high, with 75 percent of Americans now saying they would block such a project from being built in their area. That is up from 42 percent last year.
Politicians from both major parties who previously supported the infrastructure are now pivoting. They want to signal to voters that they are taking a hard line against the hated construction as the midterms approach. This includes Texas governor Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.
Some Republicans are turning away from the issue despite President Donald Trump’s vigorous support for data centre 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 it had identified 200 accounts linked to China that were helping to spread anti-data centre talking points on the platform. This caused a flurry of alarmist headlines and tweets. Axios trumpeted in an article on X’s report, which data centre-friendly politicians and right-wing figures amplified using X itself, that “China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage”.
Even the president joined in. He wrote in a Truth Social post defending data centres, “let Data Reign!”, that “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement”. He made this statement just a few days after the X report.
The idea that Americans hate data centres because of a nebulous foreign influence operation is a handy excuse for the technology’s backers and their allies. It is one that has 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 centre 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”.
Claims that Americans hate data centres 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 centres.
It is 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 centre 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 does not? Graphika, a social media analytics firm that has been tracking data centre sentiment online, told me in June that most of the opposition they had seen thus far was homegrown. That has not changed. There is still very little evidence of significant foreign intervention, Tyler Williams, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, told me this week.
Blogger Andy Masley has a healthy skepticism of the China narrative. Masley, whose blog is largely funded by a grant from effective altruist philanthropy Coefficient Giving, is popular with tech boosters on X for his pro-data centre takes. But “as soon as I start talking China, they get quiet,” he tells me. “It seems like a very convenient belief. I have my own biases as a Democrat, but I sometimes look at these [tech] guys and think, ‘Oh, they had to meme themselves into being more right-wing a few years ago. They think right-wing people like it when you talk about China.'”
Masley has put out a public call for any insider information from the tech world about Chinese intervention. He says he has not gotten anything solid yet. It is also worth noting that right-wing attempts to blame China for sowing data centre discord come as members of the Trump administration complain that Chinese firms are stealing American advances in AI. If you are having trouble wrapping your head around why China would try to muddy the waters around the infrastructure that its AI models are allegedly coasting on, you are not the only one.
I took my obsession over this topic to Louise Matsakis, WIRED’s senior business editor and resident China expert. She says that this whole episode belies a basic misunderstanding of what Chinese influence campaigns actually look like. She also did not seem surprised that this narrative was taking off like wildfire among factions on the right, which has a long history of pointing the finger at China for American problems. Louise tells me that, at the end of the day, panics like these are not really about China at all.
“It is endlessly fascinating to me how China becomes a scapegoat,” she says. “Americans often find it easier to put the blame on a nebulous other, rather than to actually look at themselves.”
What WIRED’s Writing
My colleague Paresh Dave wrote an eye-opening piece recently about Meta’s push to build out a robot workforce in data centres. “I was surprised to learn that some data centres have cafeterias, with full-on kitchen staff,” he tells me. “It’s important to realize that as data centres automate some of the more technical work and reduce on-site jobs, operators could also save money on items such as food and janitorial services—and all those people would also be losing work.”
What We’re Reading
- An outrageous story is unfolding in Arkansas, where Entergy tried to get a restraining order against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which published details of the utility’s data centre-related deal with Google that were obtained via a records request. The utility claims that trade secrets were accidentally released, and also dragged the young mom who made the original records request into court. More coverage from the Arkansas Times.
- The Financial Times covers how AI has caused high unemployment for college graduates in Texas—a state that has one of the largest number of data centres in development.
- And The Washington Post reports on a massive new influx of state legislation around data centres heading into the 2026-2027 legislative year.
