By The fight over artificial intelligence is no longer confined to laboratories, chip factories and Silicon Valley boardrooms.
Increasingly, it is being fought at zoning meetings, utility commissions and county boards across America, where residents are pushing back against the data centers that supply the computing capacity the industry needs to grow.
Now there is evidence that China would very much like to encourage that resistance, according to Axios.
Twitter said this week that its Safety team uncovered a massive network of suspected Chinese accounts, including hundreds apparently attempting to influence the American debate over artificial intelligence, electricity and data centers.
The revelation does not mean that Americans who oppose data centers are Chinese dupes. The concerns driving local opposition — electricity prices, water consumption, noise, infrastructure and sweetheart tax arrangements — are often entirely legitimate.
But it does illustrate something policymakers cannot afford to ignore: China has an obvious strategic interest in an America that makes building the physical infrastructure of artificial intelligence as difficult as possible.
And while Americans debate whether to allow that infrastructure at all, Beijing is unlikely to impose the same handicap on itself.
Twitter Uncovers a Massive Bot Farm
Twitter’s Global Government Affairs account said the Safety team had examined “suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations” and 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,” the company said.
“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.”
X added that it remains “committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest” and that it suspends accounts that violate its authenticity rules.
There are important limits to what X has disclosed. The company did not say publicly how many of the roughly 200,000 accounts it had removed, what most of the network was discussing or precisely how it concluded that the operation was Chinese.
The roughly 200 accounts discussing AI and energy policy were only a fraction of the larger network.
Still, the episode is noteworthy because those accounts were not inventing some obscure controversy from scratch. They were attempting to insert themselves into one of the fastest-growing political fights in the country.
Congress Was Already Watching
House Republicans have spent months asking whether foreign adversaries are attempting to slow America’s artificial-intelligence infrastructure buildout.
On June 4, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., joined subcommittee chairmen John Joyce, R-Pa., and Bob Latta, R-Ohio, in asking FBI Director Kash Patel and White House science advisers David Sacks and Michael Kratsios for a briefing on alleged influence campaigns by China, Russia and Iran aimed at hindering American AI development and data-center construction.
“The fact that Chinese Communist Party-backed entities and other foreign adversaries may be attempting to influence decisions related to American data center infrastructure puts into perspective how serious of a fight we are in,” Guthrie said at the time.
The committee cited outside estimates suggesting that local opposition has blocked or delayed tens of billions of dollars in projects.
Data Center Watch, for example, estimated delayed projects in Virginia — already the country’s largest data-center market — at roughly $45.8 billion, in addition to projects that had been blocked outright.
Those figures document local and legal opposition. They do not establish that China caused it.
That distinction matters.
Americans do not need encouragement from Beijing to dislike an enormous industrial facility appearing near their homes. Elected officials in both parties have supported moratoriums, restrictions or opposition to projects. Residents routinely raise concerns about electricity rates, water supplies, noise, land use and tax incentives.
The debate is real.
Foreign adversaries simply appear to have noticed it.
OpenAI Saw Something Similar
Twitter’s disclosure also follows an earlier operation uncovered by OpenAI.
In June, OpenAI said it disrupted two clusters of ChatGPT accounts that likely originated in China.
One operation, which OpenAI called “Data Center Bandwagon,” produced English-language comments and images arguing that AI facilities were increasing household electricity prices.
Another focused on American tariffs and technology competition.
OpenAI said operators used Simplified Chinese prompts, VPNs and personas designed to appear American.
The company concluded that the data-center operation “sought to exploit and amplify existing public concerns” but found “no evidence of meaningful breakout beyond its own activity.”
That wording is important.
China did not need to manufacture American skepticism toward data centers.
It merely needed to amplify it.
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