While China has been pouring billions into its own AI infrastructure and expansion, it may also be funding an equally expensive influence campaign here in the U.S. to oppose the building of data centers — critical to advancing the technology.

The stakes in the AI are incredibly high, so high that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently said whoever dominates in the field of artificial intelligence is "going to control the world."

While China is massively expanding their AI industry growing evidence indicates they are pushing misinformation campaigns in the U.S. with the goal of stopping or delaying the build out of data centers.

These centers are massive computing factories with significant energy and water needs that are key to running AI systems like Grok, ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and others.

The data centers have become a focal point for supporters and opponents of the new technology.

In April Sen. Bernie Sanders convened his own panel on Capitol Hill to discuss "the existential threat of AI," claiming "the richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes."

Sanders did not hide China’s interest in stopping U.S. AI development. He asked two senior Chinese officials to host the panel with him.

The pair from China — Zeng Yi, dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, and Xue Lan, a Tsinghua University professor and Counselor to China’s State Council — used their Capitol podium to downplay the U.S.-China AI race.

The far left is unequivocally seeking to completely stop U.S. advancement.

Earlier this year Sanders, along with fellow Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act. The bill would freeze all new U.S. construction of AI datacenters.

President Donald Trump and others have been counterpunching in what they see an undue foreign influence over a critical technology for U.S. security and economic interests.

On Monday, Trump signed a slew of Executive Orders that aim to combat security risks posed by foreign adversaries.

Last year he signed an Executive Order that streamlined the permitting process for data centers and provided loans and tax incentives for their construction.

In December he reinforced his earlier Order with another one that shields federal permitting from state and local rules.

In May a sweeping new 17-page report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute raised real concerns about China’s efforts to back efforts to sow distrust of data centers and effectively block AI programs in the U.S.

The Institute’s report — "Foreign Influence in the Campaign Against American AI" — details what it calls a multi-year influence operation backed by China targeting U.S. AI data centers and programs. 

Sam Lyman, BPI’s head of research and a former senior advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, traces three interlocking vectors: Chinese state media propaganda; a U.S.-based nonprofit network bankrolled by Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American with ties to the Chinese Communist Party; and more than $2 billion in dark money from foreign billionaires routed into the very groups now demanding moratoriums.

"None of this is hidden," the report states. "Each layer is documentable from primary sources."

The stakes could not be higher, Lyman told Newsmax in an interview.

"Data centers are critical to winning the AI race. Whoever wins, will control the information layer of the global economy, which is why the U.S., with its commitment to free expression, must win," Lyman said.

Indeed, President Xi Jinping himself declared AI "an important strategic handhold" for Beijing to seize global technological supremacy with a national plan to make China the world’s AI innovation center by 2030. 

While China’s media outlets like CGTN have published and aired reports warning Americans that data centers will spike their electricity bills, strain power grids, and contribute to global warming —  the same outlets trumpet Beijing’s subsidies that slash energy costs for China’s own AI businesses by up to 50%.

Inside the U.S., the most "operationally significant" player is that web of 501(c)(3) nonprofits funded by Singham, as tax records show that the tech billionaire and Marxist activist has poured some $285 million into activist groups since 2017.

Singham’s wife, Jodie Evans, co-founded CodePink, a far-left protest group that has run explicit campaigns against U.S. AI data centers and the Pentagon’s AI efforts, framing them as part of a new Cold War on China.

And multiple signatories to the coalition letter that helped trigger the Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez moratorium bill have taken Singham money.

The movement is also getting an assist from leftist billionaires like Switzerland’s Hansjörg Wyss and Britain’s Alan Parker and his Oak Foundation.

Together these billionaires alone have funneled more than $2 billion into U.S. advocacy, with about $39 million reaching 12 organizations actively opposing data-center expansion. 

A single $1.3 million Wyss grant went to a signatory of the December 2025 moratorium demand letter — with the grant using the same language that appears in the bill from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.

The activists they fund have been increasingly effective at the national and local levels.

So far about five dozen moratoriums have already passed at the local government level, pausing the construction of new data centers in multiple states, according to Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks economic development and corporate subsidies.

Beyond claims that AI is causing electric bills to surge, the left is using environmentalism as an excuse to halt new data centers. 

Ocasio-Cortez, at a Congressional hearing on May 20, dramatically displayed jars of dirty water, claiming the culprit was a Georgia AI data center from Meta, the Facebook parent.

In reality, the brown water came from four private wells and was likely from normal construction dirt that started when Meta broke ground. A probe found no evidence the running of the data center harmed the water supply.

Still, the stunt whipped up a panic about a lack of potable water in the area due to Meta’s project.

Experts say that the water used by most data centers is less than the amount to manage a typical 18-hole golf course.

Hudson Institute research fellow Zineb Riboua sees a deeper ideological driver behind a disparate left-wing coalition that includes CodePink, NAACP chapters, environmental groups, and even anti-Israel activists. 

"These groups arrive with a fully formed ideological inheritance," she told Newsmax.

"They hold the conviction that Western capitalism is structurally predatory and that American technological power is merely colonialism by another name.

"The data center is simply the latest surface of this." 

The selectivity, Riboua notes, is revealing. 

"China is building data centers at a scale and speed that dwarfs the American buildout, consuming coal-fired power with no environmental review, no community consultation, and no indigenous land acknowledgment — and there is not a single CodePink rally, NAACP resolution, or climate justice statement directed at any of it," she said.

The impact of the foreign-backed activism is having a real impact on public opinion.

A Gallup poll released in May shows the backlash is real: seven in 10 Americans oppose new AI data centers in their local area, with Democrat opposition especially intense.

Hundreds of local fights, lawsuits, and rallies have delayed or blocked projects worth tens of billions of dollars, with perhaps a single critic inside the Democratic Party, Sen. John Fetterman.

Fetterman has denounced the moratorium push as "lunacy" and a "China-first kind of a policy."

Republicans in Congress are becoming more vocal on the foreign involvement in these campaigns.

Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has opened a probe of the Chinese money flows to activist groups in the U.S.

Smith recently called on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to remove the tax-exempt status of groups receiving foreign funding who oppose AI data centers because such activities "jeopardize our national and economic security."

"We’ve tracked down Chinese money that’s come into U.S. non-for-profits that are organizing the protests against data centers because China wants to win computational dominance," Smith said.

"If they can sow discord and chaos within the American citizenry, they’ll slow down [the U.S. in] the AI race — and they win," he said, adding "We have to be guarded."

Paul Bond has been a journalist for three decades, writing stories reporters in legacy media typically ignore.