Opposition to the construction and operation of new data centers in the United States is a Chinese communist social media psyop, according to those whose wealth depends on growth fueled by the construction and operation of new data centers and thus viewed skeptically by a Business Insider report on the matter. Not lost on the outlet is the irony of oligarchs like Kevin O’Leary complaining about the alleged foreign malefaction while failing to direct their complaints at the social media networks helmed by wealthier oligarchs like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, whose business models are explicitly opposed to throttling foreign malefaction and unfettered propaganda campaigns.
Two things can be true at the same time: One is that Americans don’t want AI data centers in their neighborhoods, spiking utility bills by sucking up electricity and polluting water supplies by cycling it in and out as a sink for the immense heat generated by the processing equipment. The other is that any friction for the American tech industry redounds to China’s benefit as they seek to win the arms race and establish an indefinite state of global dominance in artificial intelligence, so spending a few man-hours here and there stoking the real opposition to the centers could end up paying dividends.
Plus it’s not like their own citizens are allowed to complain, so why not exploit that built-in advantage they have over the US, especially when, as noted, data centers’ unpopularity isn’t Pizzagate. It’s not some basement incel fairy tale picked up from 4chan and spread by bots coded by soulless human automatons working out of a windowless office in Beijing or St Petersburg or Pyongyang or Tehran.
Unsubtle headline of ChatGPT owner OpenAI’s June 2026 white paper on ChiCom influence campaigns
The numbers don’t lie: According to data compiled from the US Department of Energy, McKinsey, Brookings, and the Electric Power Research Institute‘s reports, networked computing consumed roughly 60 terawatt hours that year, about 1.7 percent of all electricity consumed in the US. That figure actually represented a drop from the total power usage by the internet as it was when businesses shut down their own in-house server racks and migrated to remote cloud computing infrastructure through brands like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. By 2021 the share was around 2.5 percent and 105 TWh, growth fueled in part by 4K video streaming and SaaS platforms’ proliferation, both of which spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. By this year however and according to estimates, networked computing infrastructure will have consumed fucking 260 terawatt hours, or 5.8 percent of all the electricity generated in the United States this year, near quadrupling in absolutes and more than quadrupling as a percentage of consumption since 2016.
And no, that’s not a plateau. Not even close. Berkeley Lab estimates we’re looking at 325 to 580 terawatt hours or about 7 to 12 percent of projected US electricity generation by 2031. Safe to say that’s simply not going to sustainable without some good old-fashioned Silicon Valley-style ingenuity – and rapaciousness. It’ll be interesting to see how they make that happen while sticking to their core business principles of privatizing the gains while socializing the ruinous consequences.
I am calling for a one-year moratorium on new data centers until we establish a fair, transparent approval process that puts local communities first. pic.twitter.com/67tKmBtF3h
— Mike Rogers (@MikeRogersForMI) August 21, 2026
Even when that ruin’s being visited politically upon their own allies-of-convenience in the Republican Party, who are fucking begging the tech industry to do something, anything to improve data centers’ public image, screaming “THE DATA CENTER BRAND IS THE ANCHOR: Data centers are the centerpiece in the case Sherrod Brown is litigating, he has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record” in a new memo, lol. Who said this shitshow had to be all bad news?
Why shouldn’t the old “move fast and break things” also break the unearned confidence of mediocre white men whose self-image rests on assured control of their electoral fortunes? Why make these kind of panicked moves when your opponents are some old dinosaur rust-belt Democrat and a Muslim socialist who wants kids to obey Sharia law and also undergo sexual transition surgeries?
🚨 President Trump DOUBLES DOWN on his support for AI data centers, but say other Republicans can have their own stance
"If I was a mayor or if I was a governor in a state, I would want to have data centers because they bring tremendous income, they're clean, they produce their… pic.twitter.com/pEY3stwFTA
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 21, 2026
Yeah. There’s their Holy Orange Messiah not helping the situation at all, sure. Kind of hard for the average voter to separate the frantic rear-guard actions of Republican Senate candidates with the pro-data center rhetoric of the tyrant whose wrath they live in unceasing fear of. You could factor in that he’s doing absolutely fucking nothing to throttle new construction projects let alone even messaging in the same direction. At the same time that kind of overstates Trump’s agency here because even if he were to forego the bribes from his cronies and actually take them on how much could he seriously do to stop their onslaught? The half-dead old sack of shit can’t even defeat a lightweight third-world mediocrity like Iran, how the hell is he supposed to go toe-to-toe with the 21st century tech industry in all its immense power and essentially unlimited resources?
Which leaves Republicans making all these hollow gestures at opposition to data centers, the NRSC begging the industry to figure something out to sell voters on how awesome data centers actually are, and the industry itself simply defaulting to that most time-honored and uninspired tropes of blaming hostile foreign interests for sincere and organic opposition to the corruption and abuses of a dysfunctional, quasi-autocratic state. Republicans probably feel like your typical AI chatbot user, writing “Hey you fucking defective clanker, I already told you I tried blaming Chinese communist subversion in my first prompt. I need your industry to come up with something better, NOW!” and then getting “Network currently experiencing some connection issues, please try your query later.”
Meet China’s Useful Idiot: https://t.co/ppoR0xxnyI
— Katie Miller (@KatieMiller) August 21, 2026
Must be extra frustrating when their own “talent” used 0 terawatt hours to spew out the same shit.
Full disclosure: Google Gemini Pro helped compile this article’s stats on the electricity consumption of facilities specified in the query as networked computing infrastructure, supplying the links above.
This author personally is not opposed to the proliferation of AI as obviously it made such complex research tasks more accessible. Non-complex, non-research tasks like helping users indulge in bizarre fantasies and getting them to ultimately kill themselves in the belief that their consciousness will be uploaded into a space where they can live together forever are kind of less productive uses for the tools, so maybe there should be a public conversation about what all this electricity is going.
Oh and just put the data centers next to their own fucking wind turbines out in the boondocks.