Chinese Bot Army Tries To Cancel AI, But America’s NIMBYs Show Up First

KEY POINTS

•X’s Safety team revealed around 200 suspicious Chinese-linked accounts recently pushed anti-AI data center content, including cartoons about profiteering.
•Congressional Republicans have investigated foreign influence campaigns, highlighting a $45.8 billion delay in Virginia’s data center projects.
•Public opposition to new data centers is real, with over 60% of Americans now against local builds, according to a University of Pennsylvania survey.

In a plot twist that sounds like a Silicon Valley version of The Spy Who Tried Too Hard, about 200 suspicious Chinese bot accounts took a late-night swing at convincing Americans to hate AI data centers. This covert bot ops squad, buried in a mysterious X (Twitter’s angry Elon version) Safety team report on August 27, targeted debates with cartoons of data-center CEOs swimming in cash while Americans sweat higher utility bills. Meanwhile, Congress threw shade, citing a $45.8 billion data center slowdown in Virginia, even as bipartisan politicians awkwardly agreed to local moratoriums, proving AI resistance cuts across R and D like bad Wi-Fi. Silicon Valley’s Jim Prosser says it’s less a Chinese psyop and more an epic struggle between coastal VCs and Ohio natives who just want to touch grass. Surveys disagree, with 61% of Americans now despising new data centers, a 12-point spike since spring, meaning the real enemy is probably bad local zoning meetings, not foreign internet armies.