A network of Chinese fake social media accounts is spreading anti-data center material, the X platform warned, heightening concerns by members of Congress that the data center issue is being used by Beijing to divide Americans.
X, the Elon Musk-operated social media platform and AI company, said in a Thursday night posting that "The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations."
"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," the post 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."
It concluded, "We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy."
Data centers have erupted as a hot political issue in the 2026 election season, with much of the press coverage portraying concerns about effects on electric prices or water quality as sincere rather than manufactured. A front-page New York Times news article this week, for example, reported that "The fight over data centers is suddenly at the epicenter of the midterm elections." The first named quote in the Times came from a "veteran Democratic pollster," Anna Greenberg, whose firm’s clients include Harvard University. "It’s very much a bottom up, organic movement," Greenberg said.
Maybe not as organic as the New York Times and its "veteran Democratic pollster" would have you believe.
A Democratic member of Congress from Florida, Jared Moskowitz, reacted to the news by speaking of psychological operations. "China and our adversaries are running multiple psyop operations through American platforms in order to foment division among Americans. And it has been working," he said. Merriam-Webster defines a psyop as "a military operation usually aimed at influencing the enemy's state of mind through noncombative means (such as distribution of leaflets)."
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas who President Trump described this week as "a talented guy," quoted Moskowitz’s post with a comment: "true."
The X post was also amplified by business leaders. A co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, commented, "Glad to see this. There are a lot of foreign adversary ops trying to divide the USA that we need to turn down - CCP is perhaps the worst, but Iran and others are clearly doing it, too."
A partner at Sequoia, a venture capital fund that announced in 2023 that it was splitting off its China business into an independent company, Shaun Maguire, commented, "Data centers are the auto factories of the 21st century. They will revive communities. The negative sentiment started with China, while they build gigawatts of data centers. Do not succumb to the PsyOp."
X did not indicate how many views the "suspected inauthentic" posts received on the platform.
As Moskowitz, Cruz, and Lonsdale suggested, the detected posts may be a sign of a more substantial influence operation. If China is using X to influence U.S. public opinion, it’s probably also operating on other platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. And if China is working the data center issue, it may be working other issues, too, such as Gaza "genocide." In 2024 the U.S. director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, reported that "actors tied to Iran’s government" had been observed by the U.S. intelligence community interacting with the U.S. Gaza protesters by "posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters."
The head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Sam Lyman, a former aide to Treasury Secretary Bessent, asked, "Why is Beijing putting its thumb on the scale?" In a subsequent post, he answered his own question: "Understand that the anti-data center movement is, at its core, a deindustrialization movement. So of course China is pushing it. The US is manufacturing, at scale, the most valuable resource in the modern economy: artificial intelligence. But already, the NIMBY/anti-AI coalition wants to offshore the means of production. How did that work out for us when we moved the manufacturing of steel, electronics, and other critical industries to East Asia? Well, it worked out great for China, but decimated America's Heartland. … For the first time in decades, we have a chance to reclaim industrial supremacy in the very sector that will determine the future of the global economy."
Lyman told the Washington Free Beacon, "Chip constraints have handicapped China in the AI race, preventing them from building data centers at the same speed and scale we are building them in the United States. To hobble our progress, Beijing has sown fear, division, and outright falsehoods about American data centers. Specifically, it has leveraged bot swarms, English-language propaganda outlets, and CCP-aligned political networks operating here at home to magnify anger and paranoia in what is otherwise an organic opposition movement. At stake in this debate is America’s reindustrialization, and China knows it."
The owner and publisher of the Southern Maryland Chronicle, a website whose article about data centers was identified by X as having been amplified by the Chinese bots, David Higgins II, told the Free Beacon, "the Southern Maryland Chronicle has not paid for, authorized, or in any way arranged for promotion of our content by the accounts shown in that post. We have no relationship with those accounts and no knowledge of who operates them." He said, "we have no involvement with and no ability to control how our publicly available content is shared or amplified by third parties, including bad actors. We want to be unambiguous that this promotion was neither requested nor sanctioned by us in any way."
The Free Beacon has published a series of dispatches highlighting China’s hand in the anti-data-center movement in the U.S. An April 2026 article was headlined, "Chinese Propaganda Outlets Jump Into Crusade Against Data Centers as Beijing Races To Achieve AI Supremacy." A May 2026 article was headlined, "Foreign Donors Fuel US Data Center Opposition, Records Show." And a June 2026 article was headlined "Notorious, China-Based American Mogul Is Running Shadowy Influence Campaign to Undermine U.S. AI Efforts, Give Communist China an Edge in Technology Arms Race." The New York Times eventually mustered a July 2026 follow-up headlined "China, Russia and Others Seek to Inflame Debate Over A.I. Data Centers" that did not credit the Free Beacon and that apparently was missed by the editor of the Times piece quoting veteran Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg about how "organic" the whole thing is. About as organic as a made-in-China polyester pantsuit.
