Is it a Chinese Psy-Op? Are Americans ignorant? Or are tech bros just completely out of touch?
Tech leaders across the country are full of ideas about why Americans are in a furor against data centers, positing theories on social media that range from practical to patronizing.
“Most explanations of why datacenters are actually fine boil down to simple math,” Yishan Wong, Reddit’s former CEO, wrote on X. “The majority of people do not understand simple math.”
Data centers, which provide compute for large AI platforms, have come under bipartisan scrutiny in recent weeks as Americans across the country protest them in local town hall meetings and rallies in Washington.
In a Gallup poll released in May, over 70% of respondents reported opposing data center construction in their area. Members of that group said they worried about energy and water consumption, but also reported an overall dislike of AI.
Those feelings among Americans are now trickling down to their representatives as November’s midterm elections draw closer.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, once a champion of AI data center expansion, has recently reversed course, announcing strict guidelines that all new projects must follow. He said Wednesday that the state has halted as many as 1,800 data center proposals.
For AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and others, the issue is existential. Without AI data centers, they can’t power the products they sell.
This week, President Donald Trump put it succinctly: Data centers, he said, “could use a little public relations help.”
The AI industry, however, is not sure that messaging is the only problem. Here’s what its vanguard is saying.
The Chinese psy-op
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan took to X on Friday to signal boost a theory that “CCP state media, a Shanghai-based Marxist’s nonprofit network, and foreign billionaire dark money” are influencing an advocacy campaign in the US against data centers.
“Reminder: the datacenter discourse is a documented psyop and they’re winning,” Tan wrote.
Trae Stephens, a cofounder of Andruil Industries, said on X that data center backlash is the result of Americans “being poisoned by CCP propaganda.”
“It’s almost like not banning TikTok has had real world consequences,” Stephens wrote, appearing to reference the short-form video platform’s Chinese ownership.
Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of Palantir, wrote in a reply to Stephens’ post that “China has identified a key weak point in our open society in this area, and juiced it with the equivalent of steroids.”
Though data center construction is key to maintaining American technological dominance over rival countries like China, evidence of actual Chinese interference is scant.
An American Energy Institute report from April found that anti-data-center groups in the US have received $39 million in foreign funding, with a “substantial portion” of that money coming from individual philanthropists in Europe.
Earlier this summer, Fox News issued an apology after Kevin O’Leary said opponents of his Utah data center were working with China. Fox News host Johnny Joey Jones said there was “no evidence” that the groups referenced by O’Leary were funded by or working in coordination with the Chinese Communist Party.
Bad optics
Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, said on X on Thursday that tech leaders have “failed miserably” in winning over the public on data centers. By filling the air with “arcane technical jargon,” Chamath said CEOs are confusing the public and breeding skepticism.
“Data centers have unfortunately become THE symbolic representation of the asymmetric upside for a very narrow tech elite and a class that are untrustworthy,” Palihapitiya wrote.
Tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have repeatedly issued dire warnings about the potential impact of AI over the last year. Amodei famously said it would wipe out half of all entry-level jobs. Both companies have recently publicized worrisome behavior from their models during testing.
Some of their rivals, like Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, have criticized them for such messaging, encouraging them to talk more about the potential upsides of the technology. Amodei recently denied that his warnings were part of the problem in a lengthy X post.
“I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative,” he wrote. He went on to say that “actually curing cancer” was likely the only way to change public perception.
Wong, in the same breath in which he said Americans can’t do math, also said that “not taking responsibility” for the data center backlash isn’t doing tech leaders any favors.
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