When the Grassroots Have a Foreign Accent: The Strange Geography of America's Anti-Data-Center Movement

A Gallup survey released on May 13 found that 71 percent of American adults oppose having an AI data center built near where they live, with 48 percent strongly opposed. That number is higher than opposition to nuclear plants. In a country where almost nothing polls at 71 percent, the result was treated as a national signal: the AI infrastructure boom has run into an organic wall of voter resistance.

Maybe. But before we accept that framing, it is worth looking carefully at who has been pouring money, messaging, and digital amplification into the anti-data-center movement over the past 18 months. Because when you map the funding, the publication patterns, and the state media output, something other than spontaneous American grassroots opposition starts to emerge.

The convenient timing

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act on March 25 of this year. The bill calls for a nationwide pause on new data center construction. According to a report released this week by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, titled "Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI," the bill was introduced exactly 107 days after a coordinated letter signed by 230 nonprofits, organized by Food and Water Watch, called for that same moratorium. Several of the signing organizations receive funding traced to networks tied to Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and British billionaire Alan Parker, both of whom have built U.S. advocacy infrastructure for years.

A nationwide policy outcome that perfectly aligns with the strategic interest of an adversarial state should at minimum prompt the question of who funded the runway.

The Singham pipeline

The most documented thread runs through Neville Roy Singham, an American tech entrepreneur who relocated to Shanghai and now openly affiliates with the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Digital analyzed 223 financial transactions across five continents from 2017 through 2025 totaling roughly $591 million flowing through the Singham network. That money funds organizations including CodePink, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, People's Dispatch, and BreakThrough News.

What is notable is not just the funding, but the content cadence. On March 27, Tricontinental published "Breaking the Stranglehold: How China Is Shattering US Technological Hegemony," arguing against U.S. AI chip export controls. The same day, People's Dispatch published "Kill Chain: Silicon Valley, AI, and the war on Iran," attacking American AI firms including Anthropic and Palantir. In January, CodePink ran an article framing opposition to Meta's Hyperion data center in Louisiana and Meta Cheyenne in Wyoming as opposition to "the new Cold War on China." On May 1, CodePink published "The Dark Side of the Data Center Boom." On May 17, the same group published an Instagram video attacking a proposed Utah data center backed by Kevin O'Leary.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute report describes this same-day publication pattern across affiliated outlets as a marker of coordinated advocacy infrastructure rather than spontaneous citizen objection. Independent grassroots movements do not generally publish synchronized content across four properties on a single day.

The state-media chorus

Separate from the nonprofit pipeline, a Washington Free Beacon investigation by Collin Anderson documented that the official state propaganda arms of China, Russia, and Iran are all running parallel anti-data-center content for U.S. audiences. An October 2025 CGTN video described data centers as a major spike driver in U.S. energy prices on the West Coast, Mid-Atlantic, and New England. China Daily published a piece headlined "AI boom sends electricity bills in US skyrocketing." Russia Today amplified state moratorium fights in Maine, New York, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. Iran's IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency, in December, blamed U.S. data centers for keeping retired coal plants online.

This is documented output, not speculation. It is what each outlet has actually published in English, targeted at U.S. readers, during a period in which Beijing is racing to close the AI infrastructure gap with Washington. The American Edge Project has compiled similar findings, noting that authoritarian propaganda outlets are running a coordinated push to convince Americans to halt the very buildout that powers the U.S. AI economy.

The X dimension

The story has moved aggressively onto X in the last two weeks. Investor Kevin O'Leary, who backs the 40,000-acre Stratos data center campus in Utah's Box Elder County, posted that he is seeing what he described as an immediate spike in coordinated misinformation across Instagram and X, with IP traffic patterns he believes trace back to organized networks. He named four groups: Party for Socialism and Liberation, People's Dispatch (both Singham-funded), and two Utah organizations, Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies. He claimed money tied to Alliance for a Better Utah flowed through Arabella Advisors, the U.S.-based dark money conduit that has long been used to obscure donor identities.

The Utah groups have flatly denied the funding allegations, and a viral counter-video from Elevate Strategies has racked up more than two million views mocking O'Leary as a Canadian billionaire picking on local women. That counter-narrative is itself instructive. Whether or not those specific two organizations have any foreign tie, the velocity at which the mocking content scaled is the precise pattern foreign influence operations exploit. You do not have to fabricate a movement. You only have to amplify one that already exists.

The honest caveats

A thoughtful version of this argument has to acknowledge what it is not claiming. Most Americans who oppose a data center going up next to their property are not Chinese assets. They are people worried about their water table, their power bills, their property values, and in cases like the Stratos project, the projected 9 gigawatts of electricity demand that exceeds Utah's entire current statewide consumption. Those concerns are legitimate, and Robert Davies, a Utah State University physicist, has raised technical questions about waste heat in the Hansel Valley that deserve real answers.

Samm Sacks, a U.S.-China tech scholar, told Semafor on May 5 that Chinese state media tends to take advantage of narratives already underway in the United States rather than seed them from scratch. That is almost certainly correct. The water concerns in Utah and the grid concerns in Virginia preexist any CGTN segment.

But the existence of organic concerns does not preclude foreign amplification. Both can be true. Russia did not invent racial tension in the United States in 2016, but the Internet Research Agency cheerfully poured gasoline on it. The same playbook now appears to be running against AI infrastructure, with the added wrinkle that the Trump administration has gutted the very offices that would normally identify it. The Global Engagement Center has been shuttered. The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force has been weakened. The Foreign Malign Influence Center at ODNI has been cut back. Foreign Affairs magazine called this an act of unilateral disarmament. Whoever is running influence operations against U.S. AI buildout right now is running them against a defender that has taken its own goalkeeper off the field.

The investigation that should happen

Power the Future, a pro-energy nonprofit, sent a letter on May 6 to House Oversight Chairman James Comer and Senator Rand Paul asking for a formal investigation into the funding behind anti-data-center campaigns across 24 states. The House Ways and Means Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party are reportedly examining whether some of the nonprofits in the Singham orbit should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

That investigation is the right one to run, and it should be run on the documents, not on the vibes. FARA registration, Form 990 filings, donor-advised fund flows, and IP traffic logs are auditable. So is the publication cadence across CGTN, China Daily, Global Times, RT, Fars, and the Singham-funded U.S. outlets. The question is not whether ordinary Americans have real concerns about data centers. They do. The question is whether an adversary has identified those concerns as a strategic opportunity, and is now funding, coordinating, and amplifying them at scale.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute report frames the stakes plainly: the choice is not between AI and no AI, but between American AI and Chinese AI. If we are going to debate moratoriums in 24 statehouses and on the Senate floor, the country deserves to know whose money is paying for the debate.