China has sought to stir up the controversy around data centers in the United States, aided by a strain of political thought hostile to billionaires and Big Tech.

The ongoing debate over data centers—those flat-topped, energy-intensive, exurban behemoths powering the artificial intelligence revolution—has in recent years roiled Congress, statehouses, and local town halls, pitting pioneering technology companies against a combination of local activists, AI skeptics, and outright degrowthers.

We now know that another extraordinarily influential force has also put its thumb on this crucial American policy discussion: the People’s Republic of China.

In a blockbuster report issued last week, entitled “PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US,” tech giant OpenAI found that actors originating in China “used our models in support of apparent covert influence operations that promoted narratives in an attempt to manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and wider tech policies.” Specifically, one cluster of Chinese users of OpenAI’s platform, in plain violation of its terms and conditions, “generated social media comments and images claiming that data center buildouts for AI were increasing electricity prices for average families.” A second cluster produced and disseminated content “criticizing US tariffs as attempts to dominate technological competition and specified in their prompts that the content should not include China’s leader Xi Jinping in the output and instead include only President [Donald] Trump.”

China Is Catching Up to America in AI Use

Beijing’s apparent meddling in the American tech debate comes at a particularly fraught moment in the unfolding AI context between China and the Western world. In April, a major study from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence revealed that China is rapidly closing the AI gap with the United States.

“For years,” the researchers wrote, “the US outpaced all other global regions on AI—in model size, performance, artificial intelligence research, citations, and more. But China emerged as an AI counterweight to the US, gradually gaining ground, and this year it appears to have nearly erased any US lead.” The Stanford researchers noted that in February 2025, China’s DeepSeek-R1 model had equaled the level of the most advanced US AI and that, to date, Anthropic’s top model leads its Chinese counterpart by a mere 2.7 percent—a differential that had previously been in the double digits.

Meanwhile, in April, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recently conducted a hearing on “China’s Campaign to Steal America’s AI Edge” in which Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) asserted that “China’s smuggling of advanced AI chips is a pervasive threat facing law enforcement.” Moolenaar drew particular attention to a recent $2.5 billion chip smuggling case, which he noted “would be the largest export control violation in US history.”

Progressive Lawmakers Are Playing into Beijing’s Hands

In parallel, the Chinese are benefiting from the unwitting assistance of prominent progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), both of whom have aggressively attacked the AI infrastructure critical to winning the technology race.

In March, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced the “AI Data Center Moratorium Act” in their respective chambers of Congress, writing, “We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity.” In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal the following month, Sanders argued that AI was “undermining our democracy,” “damaging the environment,” “pos[ing] an existential risk to the human race,” “threaten[ing] our privacy,” and “reshaping how we as human beings relate to one another.”

Yet advocates for democracy and privacy rights were nowhere to be found when Sanders made the baffling decision to host a Capitol Hill discussion featuring Xue Lan, a professor at Tsinghua University, and Zeng Yi, dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. Sanders’ willingness to take lessons from China, one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights, on AI ethics raised eyebrows across the capital; even the Washington Post editorial board lambasted the senior senator from Vermont’s approach as “dangerous” and a “fantasy.”

Given what we now know about China’s covert efforts to stir the pot on American tech dominance in general and data centers in particular, Sanders’ ill-conceived efforts appear even more reprehensible. Not only are Beijing’s technical AI advances surging, but it is apparently engaged in a concerted effort to undermine our own.

Fortunately, in this instance, Beijing’s influence campaign seems to have had little effect. OpenAI noted in its statement that while the PRC-originating operation “sought to exploit and amplify existing public concerns about energy prices and local impacts of data center development,” the company had nonetheless “found no evidence of meaningful breakout beyond its own activity.”

There are legitimate—if sometimes overblown—objections to the mushrooming of data centers across the United States. But the last thing that Americans who are carefully weighing how to integrate AI innovations and infrastructure into our society and economy need is interference by foreign actors—especially by the nation seeking to supplant the United States as the leading global pioneer.

About the Author: Michael Rosen

Michael M. Rosen is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in intellectual property issues in the field of technology. He is the author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI (2025). A practicing trial attorney, Michael is the founder and principal of Rosen Technology Law. He joined Irell & Manella as counsel in 2022.

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