Alexandra Crawford holds a sign outside a planning commission meeting Thursday, June 11, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. The commission will consider an ordinance regulating data centers. (AP Photo/George Walker IV) The race for artificial intelligence is often described as a competition over semiconductors, foundation models and talent. Increasingly, however, it is also becoming a competition over something far less glamorous: electricity, transmission lines, and the data centers that power modern AI.
That shift has implications far beyond industrial policy. It is also reshaping how China influences public debate inside the U.S.
For years, U.S. policymakers have focused on defending against Chinese cyber espionage, intellectual property theft, and influence campaigns aimed at Washington. Yet as federal institutions have become harder targets, Beijing’s information operations appear to be evolving. Rather than trying to persuade Americans to support China directly, recent evidence suggests a growing emphasis on amplifying existing domestic disagreements around strategically important industries.
Earlier this year, a report by OpenAI explained how the company disrupted a Chinese-linked influence operation that used ChatGPT to generate fabricated social media posts opposing American AI data centers. The campaign dubbed ”Data Center Bandwagon” created fake American personas arguing that data centers would dramatically increase electricity bills and harm local communities. OpenAI traced the activity to a private Chinese technology company working for provincial government clients.
By itself, the operation was relatively modest, producing just a handful of fake accounts. But that misses the larger strategic significance. The campaign illustrates an important evolution in Chinese influence. Rather than promoting overtly pro-Beijing narratives, the operators sought to insert themselves into an already contentious American policy debate. Instead of inventing new grievances, they amplified existing ones by creating fake local voices designed to appear authentic.
This reflects a broader trend visible across multiple recent investigations. Graphika documented “Spamouflage” networks posing as Americans across the political spectrum ahead of the 2024 election. Microsoft Threat Intelligence likewise found that Chinese influence operations have become increasingly sophisticated, experimenting with fabricated personas and targeting politically salient issues.
OpenAI’s findings indicate those same techniques are now being applied to one of the most important domestic debates of the decade: whether and where America should build the infrastructure needed to compete in the AI race.
Data centers are rapidly becoming critical national infrastructure. They underpin frontier AI development, cloud computing, advanced manufacturing, military applications, and scientific research.
The U.S. and China increasingly view AI leadership as a central determinant of economic and military competitiveness. Chinese state media has criticized American data centers as environmentally damaging and economically costly, yet the Chinese government continues to subsidize domestic AI infrastructure. China’s own electricity demand from data centers is projected to more than double by 2030.
None of this demonstrates that China singlehandedly created America’s debate over AI infrastructure. Nor does it suggest that local opposition to data centers is somehow illegitimate. Communities across the country are raising genuine concerns about energy demand, water consumption, land use, and quality of life. This distinction is important. Some reporting has questioned broader claims about coordinated Chinese involvement in domestic anti-data-center activism and emphasized that many local campaigns are rooted in authentic community concerns.
Foreign influence operations do not need to manufacture domestic disagreements from scratch. They succeed by identifying authentic social and political tensions and selectively amplifying them when doing so advances strategic objectives. This dynamic has been observed across multiple information campaigns, where state-linked actors seek to insert themselves into existing debates rather than invent entirely new ones.
In 2022, Mandiant documented Operation Dragonbridge, a Chinese state-linked campaign that posed as local Texans opposing construction of a Pentagon-supported rare earth processing facility. Google has since removed more than 175,000 Dragonbridge-related accounts across YouTube and Blogger.
The target appears to be changing. Yesterday it was rare earth processing. Today it may be AI infrastructure. Tomorrow it could be transmission lines, semiconductor fabs, quantum computing facilities, or advanced manufacturing plants. The common thread is not the issue itself but the strategy of embedding Beijing’s preferred outcomes within what appears to be authentic American political discourse.
The United States cannot and should not treat every local protest or online criticism as foreign manipulation. Democracies depend upon robust public debate, particularly when major industrial projects reshape communities. But China has no place inauthentically spinning up more anti-data center sentiment, especially while it is encouraging the massive build out in their own country. Its campaign — disparate and clumsy as it may be — aims at slowing down America’s infrastructure build out, exacerbating domestic discussions and fueling policy disagreements on all levels.
The challenge is therefore not eliminating disagreement. It is becoming better at distinguishing between genuine democratic debate and coordinated foreign efforts designed to amplify existing divisions around strategically important technologies.
Nikolas Foster is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and previously served as deputy China advisor to the administrator of USAID.
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