The progressive left is working hard to derail America’s AI dominance by blocking data center construction. So is China.
The AI push is critical to U.S. national security, to win what retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis calls the “new AI Cold War with China.” But, it is also essential to U.S. economic growth. The U.S. needs to buttress its shrinking workforce, and AI agents are standing by to take over from retiring Boomers, self-deporting immigrants, and a declining number of college graduates.
AI is coming of age at the perfect time and yet anti-growth activists, amplified by foreign adversaries and media alarmism, want to shut it all down.
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China is helping them do that. While concerns about the build-out of energy-hungry data centers across the country are spurring authentic local opposition, there is also little doubt that America’s enemies are encouraging the resistance.
In 2023, The New York Times published a report detailing their investigation into Neville Roy Singham, an American Marxist based in Shanghai who, according to the Times, “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”
At the time, Singham had funneled “at least” $275 million into leftist U.S. nonprofits like Code Pink, The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, the Justice and Education Fund, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The Times documented that these groups are interconnected, sharing staff and content; the Times writes that Singham also “shares office space — and his groups share staff members — with a company whose mission is educating foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”
Though he denies it, investigative reports and congressional leaders argue Singham’s network advances China’s strategic goals. Beijing’s main objective today is to race ahead of the U.S. in AI. President Xi cannot count on Chinese tech innovators, so is feverishly trying to hobble America’s data center build-out, the infrastructure essential to continued American dominance. Singham’s non-profit network is helping by amplifying the anti-data center campaign.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute reported recently that the “Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Marxist-Leninist group… whose stated mission is to dismantle American capitalism,” is “deeply enmeshed” in local groups fighting against data center construction. The group’s leaders come from Singham’s non-profit network and the PSL has been effective in delaying or blocking about $24 billion in proposed AI-infrastructure investment.
BPI writes, “The Singham network’s campaign against American AI has been years in the making”; it catalogs the “seeding [of] anti-data-center talking points well before the local fights began.” For instance, the PSL’s Communist paper, “Liberation News,” published a piece in 2025 blaming rising electricity bills in Illinois to the data center boom, declaring the facilities “are generating massive profits for some, but leave workers with more bills and devastate the environment.”
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In June, in response to the BPI reporting, the House Energy and Commerce Committee demanded the White House and the FBI investigate foreign efforts to block the American data center buildout. The attack on AI progress is complex; the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith wrote that the PSL and other Singham network groups are “not just one group or one campaign. It is an ecosystem of overlapping organizations, causes, and front-facing projects that all reinforce each other locally.”
According to BPI findings, campaigns tied to the Singham network have contributed to delaying or restricting projects in East Charlotte, North Carolina, Prince George’s County, Maryland, and elsewhere.
The AI industry’s brilliant CEOs have been astonishingly slow to counter the anti-data center propaganda. Only recently have the firms begun a counter-narrative highlighting the increased tax dollars and other benefits generated by their companies. For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, a giant Meta data center produced a spike in sales tax revenue which, in turn, led to teachers receiving a bonus of nearly $51,000, more than many of them make in an entire year.
In Loudon County, Virginia, some 250 data centers are expected to provide $1.3 billion in taxes, or roughly 40% of the county’s total 2027 tax revenue. For local residents, that’s some payoff.
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Americans concerned about their energy bills or worried that data centers are consuming too much water are demanding legislators protect their interests, and rightly so. The fix is not difficult, and some states are already passing bills that will require hyperscalers to provide their own electricity and limit the water used in cooling the vast computers enabling the AI boom.
Americans are also worried that AI will steal their jobs. But the truth is, with millions of Boomers (finally) retiring, a declining birth rate and an exodus of immigrants further shrinking our workforce, the U.S. needs AI to provide the labor to drive our economy forward. Young people may have to reassess which fields will be most promising, but their future will without a doubt be enhanced, and not crushed, by the most powerful technological development ever created. Those who learn how to use AI will be rewarded; those who fight it will be run over.
Overlaying the opposition to AI is a mindless hatred of President Donald Trump, who won the support of our technology leaders because he offered an economy driven by cheap energy and unhampered by the suffocating regulations and green policies of Joe Biden and his Democrat colleagues. The Left’s attack on AI-fueled growth and the billionaires creating the investment surge scratches more than one itch.
AI backlash has become a hot political weapon in the upcoming midterms, with both Republican and Democrat candidates opposing the data center build-out. The stakes are high; only China will benefit from that opposition. Senator John Fetterman gets it, writing on X, “AI supremacy and energy dominance underpins our national security.” He is correct.
