A trio of Republican representatives are calling for the FBI to investigate data center opposition, echoing the charge that anti-data center advocates in the US are backed by “foreign influence campaigns.”. “Unleashing American innovation and accelerating new advancements in AI have become key priorities for this committee and the Trump administration, and the US cannot afford to ignore the risks posed by our geopolitical adversaries’ efforts to undermine US global leadership,” reads the open letter, which was sent to crypto advisor and former PayPal COO David Sacks, science advisor Michael Kratsios, and the director of the FBI Kash Patel on June 4.. – Stefanoka. “As such, the committee requests a briefing to understand what actions the Trump administration is taking to investigate foreign influence campaigns and “billionaire-backed activism” to slow US AI development and the infrastructure necessary to support these advancements.”. The letter was penned by Representative Brett Guthrie, who chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce; Representative John Joyce, who chairs the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations; and Representative Bob Latta, who chairs the Subcommittee on Energy.. It asserts that “foreign influence campaigns… have engaged in a coordinated effort to slow US growth in AI development and the building of infrastructure supporting AI data centers,” based on reports written by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), a pro-Bitcoin American think tank, and Power the Future, a pro-fossil fuel organization.. These reports single out foreign state media, a network of organizations related to American activist Neville Roy Singham, and foreign billionaires as the “three main vectors of influence.”. The BPI’s Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI report, for instance, states that China’s state broadcaster China Global Television Network, the Chinese Communist Party-owned China Daily, and its subsidiary Global Times have produced material that is “openly campaigning against US AI data centers under their own attribution.”. The same report also cites the presence of two Chinese AI academics – namely Zeng Yi, the Dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, and Xue Lan, a professor at Tsinghua University who chairs China’s national AI governance expert committee – at a panel hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders on April 29 titled “The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation.”. The inclusion of Chinese academics in the four-person panel – the remaining two spots were filled by academics from the US and Canada – was criticized by China hawks at the time.. The BPI’s report also mentions the anti-data center stance of organizations related to Neville Roy Singham, an American citizen based in China. These include Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a Marxist think-tank run by writer and academic Vijay Prashad, and CodePink, a feminist, pacifist organization in the US.. The letter also cites a report by Power the Future, which claims that billionaires outside the US, including Swiss philanthropist Hansjorg Wyss and the heiress to the Mars candy company, Jacqueline Mars, are donating funds to legal and political organizations that are opposed to data centers.. The organizations named by the report include Food & Water Watch and the Southern Environmental Law Center.. This letter, and the reports it cites, echo a controversial rebuttal being deployed against anti-data center advocates in the US: that they are being directed by foreign forces and are responsible for ceding the ‘AI race’ to the country’s adversaries.. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said in February that those seeking a data center moratorium were “yearning to submit our society to outside forces: mobs, international councils, or communist China.”. The US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Fox News in the same month that “a moratorium on data centers would — would be like, we might as well wave the surrender flag to China right now. I mean, it is, again — that’d be complete capitulation,” in response to the nationwide data center moratorium proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.. Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary has repeatedly emphasized that opposition to his 9GW data center proposal in Utah is backed by China.. “At the end of the day, who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s one: it’s China,” said O’Leary on Fox News last month.. O’Leary also accused local anti-data center groups in Utah of being connected to China, which he called “cells.”. More in North America. 26 Feb 2026. More in Standards & Regulations. 02 Mar 2026. 19 Apr 2026
