Residents packed Memphis City Hall last week to ask the City Council to pause new data center construction, and KeShaun Pearson, who runs Memphis Community Against Pollution, was among them. They left without a decision. Council Vice Chairman Chase Carlisle asked to push the votes back, saying the council wanted to keep working on the document, according to the Memphis Flyer. By a 7-5 vote, council members put off the moratorium on new data centers and other data center rules until Oct. 20. The meeting ended before public comment, and Kevin Starr, who had come to speak for Memphis young people about data centers, never got his turn. "It was ridiculous, the situation we were put in," Pearson said. "It was ridiculous that public comment was not upheld for our community's voice to be adequately listened to by the city council."
In Washington, some of the country's most powerful people have offered a different explanation for crowds like the one in Memphis: China. On Sept. 10, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked President Donald Trump why people don't want data centers near their homes, and he said on Fox News that a lot of people call it a public relations push by China. In June, Rep. Brett Guthrie, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and two of the committee's subcommittee chairmen wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel and the White House's science advisors asking for evidence of foreign campaigns to block American data centers. "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments," Guthrie said. In late August, X $TWTR said it had found about 200 accounts in a suspected Chinese bot farm posting in a way that "could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy."
But the bot accounts behind that explanation reached almost no one. The fight against data centers is being won in rooms like the one in Memphis, by people who live near the sites. Residents worry about what they'll see from their porches and what they'll pay on their electric bills, and they have crowded into council meetings to fight the projects. Their opposition has cost developers at least $260 billion in canceled data center projects this year, according to Heatmap, a climate and energy news site, and developers pulled out of about half of that sum between July and the end of September.
The bot posts on power bills that few people saw
China's operators pushed posts that repeated a complaint Americans were already making about their electric bills. X said some of the flagged accounts blamed AI data centers for raising household power bills and straining the grid. One cartoon a China-linked group made with ChatGPT, PolitiFact reported, showed a man in a suit holding bags of money while a family asks, "Why are our electric bills so high?" Several of the bot posts on X simply linked to local news stories about a real power auction run by the grid operator PJM, according to TNW, a tech news site. Even OpenAI, which banned the ChatGPT accounts in June, said the operation "sought to exploit and amplify existing public concerns about energy prices and local impacts of data center development."
Almost no one saw those posts, though millions of people saw X's announcement about them. Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, found that at least 59 of the bot accounts X named got no engagement at all, and each one posted only two or three times before X suspended it. "No real humans saw these posts about data centers," he told Business Insider. OpenAI found "no evidence of meaningful breakout beyond its own activity" for the operation it banned. Of the roughly 200,000 accounts in the bot farm X uncovered, only about one in a thousand posted about AI and energy.
The most specific accusation that foreign money was behind local opponents fell apart within weeks. In May, Kevin O'Leary, a TV personality with his own data center plans in Utah, told Fox Business that two Utah nonprofits were acting for the Chinese government: Elevate Strategies and the Alliance for a Better Utah. Both groups, along with their founders, took him to court for defamation, according to non-profit fact-checking website PolitiFact, and on June 25, O'Leary backed down. "I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth, or Josh Kanter are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party," he wrote.
China's operators did try to ride Americans' anger over data centers, but the anger was already far too big for them to steer. Linvill, the Clemson researcher, said China is clearly trying to sway Americans, and it hasn't worked. "You can't move an oil tanker with a rowboat. And right now, the conversation about data centers is the oil tanker," he told Business Insider.
The locals who launched the fight against data centers
The Chinese accounts joined a fight Americans had already started over their electric bills. Falynn Love had never been an activist until developers proposed a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in California's San Gabriel Valley, where she met her husband 25 years ago. The plan would replace the mostly vacant mall, which sits in the City of Industry some 15 miles east of Los Angeles, with a data center, a bus station, and two warehouses. Love heard about it at a neighborhood meeting in Rowland Heights, across the street from the mall. "We're going to be bearing the cost of these kinds of projects," she told Capital & Main. She joined No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, a coalition of residents, activists, and at least six community groups worried that the data centers will dirty the air, make their neighborhoods louder, and raise their utility bills. The coalition grew through canvassing, social media, protests, teach-ins, and art builds.
Voters in nearby Monterey Park went further and banned data centers from the city. Steven Kung helped start No Data Center Monterey Park after learning about a project planned close to his home. "I couldn't believe that a data center was going to be built within a five-minute walk of my house," he told Capital & Main. Residents knocked on doors, ran social media campaigns, and held protests, and they won a temporary pause on construction, followed by a city law and finally a ballot measure. StratCap, an investment firm with Australian owners, dropped its proposal to build a 247,000-square-foot data center there after the pushback. In June, 86% of Monterey Park voters approved Measure NDC, the first ban on data centers that voters in any American city have passed. "It feels very empowering in a time when people feel powerless," Kung said.
In Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, the money for the fight came out of residents' own pockets. Greg Sussman, a South Whitehall Township resident, is fighting Project Atlas, a data center proposed across the street from Parkland High School. He and a neighbor paid for the fight themselves until they formed a nonprofit, the South Whitehall Civic Alliance, which is now raising money from the community for legal challenges to the project. "We needed the community's help to fund that effort and we still need the community's help to fund that effort," Sussman told The Morning Call.
Local fights like these have become a nationwide movement. An August report by the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, Evitable, and Together Against AI counted 580 local groups opposing data centers, with 640,000 members among them, most of them organizing on Facebook $META. Groups from Indiana to North Carolina to Alaska signed a June 11 letter asking Congress for a national moratorium.
Republicans have soured on nearby data centers too, even though Trump has backed data center construction throughout his second term. In a Pew Research Center survey of 10,548 adults taken from July 20 to Aug. 9, about two-thirds of Democrats said they wouldn't be comfortable with one opening near them, and just over half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they would be uncomfortable with a new data center in their area.
That unease is hard to pin on a few hundred Chinese bot accounts. It gets settled where neighbors of both parties show up in person. Most canceled projects end when developers can't get a local permit or a local government turns against them. The council in Memphis votes Oct. 20, and Pearson, the local organizer, vowed to be in the room.