China, Data Center Protests, and the Art of Winning a War Without Fighting

Twenty-five centuries ago, Sun Tzu wrote that supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.¹ No missiles. No sabotage teams. No crime anyone can point to. Just an adversary whose plans quietly fail, one permit hearing at a time.

Keep that sentence in mind while considering a strange fact of American life in 2026: a nationwide protest movement has risen up not against a war or a law, but against buildings full of computers. And a growing paper trail — congressional letters, a federal grand jury, and a disclosure from OpenAI itself — suggests that at least part of the machinery behind the anti-data-center movement is not American at all.

Why Data Centers Became National-Security Infrastructure

Start with what a data center actually is now. Not a warehouse of cat videos. Compute capacity — the raw processing power to train and run frontier AI — has become the strategic commodity of this decade, the way oil was in the last century and enriched uranium the one before.

Washington has said so plainly, under both parties. President Biden’s January 2025 executive order on AI infrastructure declared that building AI in the United States “will help prevent adversaries from gaining access to, and using, powerful future systems to the detriment of our military and national security.”² Six months later, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan put it in one line from AI czar David Sacks: “To remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race.”³ Sacks has warned that losing that race “would alter the balance of power in the world in a very unfavorable way,” with China running “three to six months” behind.⁴ Energy Secretary Chris Wright calls AI “the next Manhattan Project.”⁵

There is one hard constraint on all of it: electricity, delivered through buildings that take years to permit and construct. China already generates more than twice as much electricity as the United States.⁶ Beijing cannot easily slow American chip design. But American concrete? American zoning boards? Those can be slowed.

Sabotage Without a Crime

Here is the uncomfortable insight. If compute is strategic infrastructure, then a campaign that delays it degrades American power as surely as sabotage would — and no one goes to prison, because delaying a permit is not a crime. It is democracy. That is precisely what makes it the perfect instrument.

The numbers are not small. Data Center Watch counts $64 billion in U.S. data center projects blocked or delayed by local opposition in two years.⁷ The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), in a June report, traced $23.6 billion of that to 21 campaigns across 14 states in which the Party for Socialism and Liberation — a group BPI calls the political arm of a Shanghai-funded network — was involved.⁸ Every month of delay is a month of training capacity the United States does not have. Sun Tzu again: the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans.¹

What the Paper Trail Actually Shows

The documented components deserve to be stated precisely, because precision is what separates analysis from paranoia.

The money. In August 2023, the New York Times traced a global propaganda web to Neville Roy Singham, an American tech mogul living in Shanghai whose office shares space with a Chinese propaganda operation and whose network funds The People’s Forum, CodePink, and BreakThrough News through shell nonprofits registered to UPS mailboxes.⁹ BPI’s research puts Singham’s traced giving at roughly $278 million, inside a larger pool of more than $2 billion that foreign-tied charitable vehicles — including those of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and Britain’s Oak Foundation — have pushed into U.S. advocacy infrastructure.¹⁰ By January 2026, CodePink was publishing organizing guides against data centers, framing them as weapons of “the new Cold War on China.”¹¹

The megaphone. Chinese state media found the story irresistible. CGTN told American audiences the AI data center boom was driving their electricity costs higher.¹² China Daily announced that the boom was sending U.S. power bills “skyrocketing.”¹³ Xinhua showcased the backlash — the polls, the bans, the moratoriums — as a stress test for American AI expansion.¹⁴

The bots. In June 2026, OpenAI disclosed that it had banned clusters of ChatGPT accounts “likely originating from China” — one likely run by a Chinese tech company working for provincial government clients — that generated social media comments and cartoons, posing as ordinary Americans, blaming data centers for rising electricity prices.¹⁵ One operator described its own accounts using the Chinese slang for a paid troll farm.

The timing. In December 2025, a coalition letter signed by 230-plus groups demanded a national data center moratorium.¹⁶ One hundred and seven days later, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, whose conditions, BPI notes, track the letter’s demands closely; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed the House companion in June.¹⁷ No one alleges the senator is a foreign agent. The point is subtler: a moratorium on American compute is the single outcome Beijing would design if it could — and a funding network Beijing smiles upon helped build the pressure behind it.

Washington has begun treating this accordingly. Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, has demanded a Justice Department investigation, noting that no entity in the Singham network has ever been charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.¹⁸ The House Ways and Means Committee has spent months demanding the network’s funding records and threatening subpoenas.¹⁹ And in late June, according to Fox News reporting, a Manhattan grand jury began subpoenaing the network’s bank records.²⁰

The 71 Percent Problem

Now the counterweight. Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans oppose a data center in their own community — making data centers less welcome than nuclear plants.²¹ Their reasons are not imported: water use, grid strain, and utility bills that are actually rising. Wholesale power costs in the mid-Atlantic jumped 76 percent in a year, and the grid’s own market monitor blames data center demand for a $13 billion cost increase to customers.²² OpenAI itself stressed that the Chinese operation did not create this debate — it interfered in a real one, and gained little traction.¹⁵

Collapse that distinction, and you get the Kevin O’Leary episode. In May, the celebrity investor went on Fox and called Utah groups opposing his own data center project “proxies for the Chinese government.” By late June, after a demand letter arrived, he admitted he had “no evidence” — and Fox News delivered on-air apologies across four separate programs.²³ Calling your neighbors Chinese agents without proof is not counterintelligence. It is a gift to Beijing, which wants nothing more than for every genuine American grievance to be dismissed as enemy propaganda — and every accusation of foreign influence to look like a smear.

What Winning Looks Like for Beijing

Here is the final, clarifying question: what does China win if not a single data center is ever stopped?

Plenty. Every project delayed a year is compute America fields a year late in a race measured in months. Every county fight turns AI infrastructure from a shared national project into a partisan brawl. Every false accusation, like O’Leary’s, inoculates the real operation against exposure. The operation profits whether it stops the buildout or merely poisons the argument about it. That is what winning without fighting means.

Treating this as a national-security matter, rather than cable-news content, would look different from what we have seen. It means FARA enforcement with actual teeth, so foreign-funded advocacy is disclosed, not banned. It means radical transparency in nonprofit funding, so citizens can see who pays for the flyers at their county hearing. And it means answering the 71 percent honestly — with rate protections and water accountability — because the fastest way to shrink a foreign influence operation is to fix the real grievance it feeds on.

Sun Tzu’s counsel was never only advice for attackers. It is a warning for defenders: the battles that decide the most look the least like battles. This one is happening now, in zoning meetings, comment sections, and committee hearings. Recognizing it is not paranoia. It is the price of refusing to lose a war no one declared.

References

Footnotes

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ch. 3 (Lionel Giles translation, 1910): https://suntzusaid.com/book/3 ↩ ↩²
2. Executive Order 14141, “Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure,” Jan. 14, 2025: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2025/01/14/executive-order-on-advancing-united-states-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence-infrastructure/ ↩
3. White House, “White House Unveils America’s AI Action Plan,” July 23, 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/07/white-house-unveils-americas-ai-action-plan/ ↩
4. FedScoop, “White House AI czar David Sacks: ‘We’ve got to let the private sector cook,'” June 10, 2025: https://fedscoop.com/white-house-ai-czar-david-sacks-regulations-china/ ↩
5. FedScoop, “Energy Secretary Chris Wright calls AI ‘the next Manhattan Project'”: https://fedscoop.com/energy-secretary-chris-wright-ai-manhattan-project/ ↩
6. Brookings Institution, “How will the United States and China power the AI race?”, Jan. 8, 2026: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-will-the-united-states-and-china-power-the-ai-race/ ↩
7. Data Center Watch, report on blocked and delayed U.S. data center projects: https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report ↩
8. Bitcoin Policy Institute, “Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI, Part II: The Singham Ground Game,” June 29, 2026: https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/foreign-influence-campaign-against-american-ai-part-ii-singham-ground-game ↩
9. New York Times, “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul,” Aug. 5, 2023 (summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Roy_Singham) ↩
10. Bitcoin Policy Institute, “Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI,” May 18, 2026: https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/foreign-influence-in-the-campaign-against-american-ai ↩
11. CodePink, “The War Intervention: AI, Data Centers, and the Environment,” Jan. 27, 2026: https://www.codepink.org/ai_data_centers ↩
12. CGTN, “AI data center boom drives U.S. electricity costs higher,” Nov. 26, 2025: https://newsus.cgtn.com/news/2025-11-26/AI-data-center-boom-drives-U-S-electricity-costs-higher-1IBmi83EG8U/p.html ↩
13. China Daily, “AI boom sends electricity bills in US skyrocketing,” March 12, 2026: https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202603/12/WS69b1f569a310d6866eb3d4f5.html ↩
14. Xinhua, “Data center backlash tests U.S. AI expansion,” June 14, 2026: https://english.news.cn/northamerica/20260614/f1185f3ee01c4754b6ec1008cb60187b/c.html ↩
15. OpenAI, “PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US,” June 2026 Threat Report: https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-debates/ ; coverage: Axios, June 10, 2026: https://www.axios.com/2026/06/10/openai-china-ai-data-center-tariffs-chatgpt ↩ ↩²
16. Common Dreams, “230+ groups demand Congress halt data center buildout,” Dec. 8, 2025: https://www.commondreams.org/news/ai-data-centers-energy-news ↩
17. Sen. Bernie Sanders press release, “Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Announce AI Data Center Moratorium Act,” March 25, 2026: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/ ; S. 4214 text: https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/s4214/BILLS-119s4214is.pdf ↩
18. Sen. Tom Cotton, letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, June 10, 2026: https://www.cotton.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/61026blancheletter.pdf ↩
19. House Ways and Means Committee, “Chairman Smith Reasserts Demands for CCP-Linked Non-Profits to Comply with Committee Oversight,” May 5, 2026: https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2026/05/05/chairman-smith-reasserts-demands-for-ccp-linked-non-profits-to-comply-with-committee-oversight/ ↩
20. Fox News, “DOJ launches grand jury probe into Marxist mogul Neville Roy Singham’s funding of leftist groups,” June 29, 2026: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-launches-grand-jury-probe-marxist-mogul-neville-roy-singhams-funding-leftist-groups ↩
21. Gallup, “Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area,” May 13, 2026: https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-centers-area.aspx ↩
22. E&E News/Politico, “Data centers drive 76% surge in PJM power prices”: https://www.eenews.net/articles/data-centers-drive-76-surge-in-pjm-power-prices/ ↩
23. Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 2026: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/06/25/kevin-oleary-retracts-chinese/ ; The Hill, “Fox News apologizes over Kevin O’Leary China data center claims”: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5945270-fox-news-apologizes-kevin-oleary-china-data-center-claims/ ; Fox 13 Salt Lake City on the demand letter: https://www.fox13now.com/news/fox-13-investigates/oleary-said-a-demand-letter-arrived-before-his-change-on-china-influence ↩