China, Russia and Others Seek To Inflame Debate Over AI Data Centers
3 81An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans' physical and financial well-being. A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet -- created with OpenAI's ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said -- circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash. A video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure. "The country's electrical grid instability may render it useless," the video's narrator says.
All are examples of a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence -- verging at times on hostility -- about the spread of the data centers needed to power A.I. in the United States and elsewhere. China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into "a domestic fracture point," according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year. These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year's midterm elections.
3 comments
Re:and? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by swillden ( 191260 ) on <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:25AM (#66236188)
Every nation does this, they mock the failures of their adversaries. We do it constantly relating to China and Russia. So what?
I think you're misreading the intent. This isn't random mockery by individuals, shared with their friends for fun, this is a focused disinformation campaign being targeted through western communication channels. China is concerned about what it might mean geopolitically if AI turns out to be as significant as it might, and the US wins the AI race. This is an effort to slow AI development. A small and opportunistic one, probably not part of the core strategy, but a cheap, easy one that might have some beneficial effect.
Re:and? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by alcmena ( 312085 ) on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:34AM (#66236202)
Given how much screaming I've seen by the AI & DC boosters, how certain are we that this isn't a false flag operation created by those boosters to say, "See, all that outrage against AI / DCs is caused by Chinese / Russian propaganda and America is falling for it!"?
I think the part that bothers me the most is that seems just as plausible as China / Russia actually creating propaganda to do the same...
They're not wrong (Score: 5, Insightful)
by SumDog ( 466607 ) on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:09AM (#66236132)
I mean, it might be propaganda, but is it wrong? I think people are pretty hostile to these things in their backyards to begin with. They're not creating ragebait, they're taking a serious, existing political issue and capitalizing on it.
Now the great irony is China doing this when they have their own horrifically worse massive surveillance state, but make no mistake: these Data Centers are for the AI surveillance state.
They're not using all that compute to make cat videos and write code. Our end uses can't even account for a fraction of the capacity they're building. These companies are lying to us about what it's all for.