By Doug Kelly:
Something strange is happening in the American debate over data centers. The arguments showing up at state and local hearings in Maine, Ohio, and Oklahoma — that AI infrastructure is too expensive, too dirty, too dangerous — are the same arguments showing up on Chinese and Russian state television, almost word for word.
That is not a coincidence. It is a campaign.
The Washington Free Beacon reported this week that the official propaganda arms of the Chinese and Russian governments (China Daily, Global Times, China Global Television Network (CGTN), and Russia Today (RT)) are running a coordinated push to convince Americans to stop building the data centers that power our AI economy.
The report found, a China Daily article warned that American electricity prices are emerging as “a new source of economic strain” because of data centers. CGTN produced an AI-narrated video calling data centers “a major devourer of energy” driving up American electricity bills. RT, the Russian state outlet, has amplified state-level moratorium fights from Maine to South Carolina to Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, China is Full-Speed Ahead on Its Own Data Centers
Now look at what China is doing at home. Since 2017, Beijing has been executing a national plan to become the global AI leader by 2030, pouring massive amounts of state funding into electricity generation, expanding power supply, and building out data center capacity.
The Chinese government even subsidizes up to half the energy costs for its own data center buildout. In the same period its state media brags about Chinese “breakthroughs” in robotics and large language models, those same outlets are telling Americans our buildout is unsustainable.
That is the entire game. Beijing cannot out-build us, so it is trying to talk us into handcuffing ourselves.
America still leads the world in AI compute (data centers and AI chips). China and Russia both know it, and that is why they are trying to persuade Americans to pass federal, state, and local moratoriums on new data center construction.
Not only would that freeze billions in American investment, kill millions of construction jobs, and forfeit billions in local tax revenue, it would also hand Beijing and Moscow a strategic edge in the defining technology of this century.
Some American lawmakers are walking right into it. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced legislation calling for a “reasonable pause” on new data center construction.
In fact, this week, Senator Sanders is hosting two Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-affiliated academics on Capitol Hill, including a professor from Tsinghua University, which conducts research for China’s military and is a global leader in AI patents, for a discussion on the “existential threat” of AI. Inviting Beijing-backed researchers to advise American policy on the very technology Beijing is racing us to dominate is not principled caution. It is, at best, strategic confusion.
Progressive Pushback on the Moratorium Movement
Even some of the progressive movement’s own thinkers are starting to push back against moratorium madness. In a piece published in Jacobin this week, Professor Holly Buck of the University at Buffalo called data center moratoriums “a massive strategic blunder.”
She warned they would offshore AI development to countries with weaker protections, raise prices on AI services, and entrench a digital divide where wealthy professionals pay for cutting-edge tools while working families get locked out. “It’s not fair,” she wrote, “for affluent environmentalists and property owners to try to stop development of this infrastructure before most people in the world have even had a chance to work with and learn from these models.”
She is right. The loudest lawmakers about championing the working class are pushing a policy that would hurt working families first by freezing the construction jobs, the tax base for local schools, and the grid investment that data center development brings to the communities that need it most.
America’s national interest — and the interest of working families — are not served by data center moratoriums. They are served by building this AI infrastructure.
None of this means community concerns should be dismissed. Americans have legitimate questions about energy use, water, ratepayer impact, and how local communities share in the gains. Those are real issues, and they deserve real discussion and solutions at the state and local level, where they can be solved with transparency, smart permitting, and binding commitments from operators. That debate is worth having.
But the high-stakes race for global AI leadership is on, and authoritarian regimes know the cheapest way to win it is to convince Americans to stop running. We cannot let our AI debate be shaped by talking points pumped in from Beijing and Moscow. They want us to self-surrender. In response, we should run even harder and build even faster.
Doug Kelly is CEO of the American Edge Project.