China, Russia and Others Seek To Inflame Debate Over AI Data Centers (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0184434802
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/07/13/0530223/china-russia-and-others-seek-to-inflame-debate-over-ai-data-centers
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html
> 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.
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> 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 [1]turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into "a domestic fracture point ," according to a [2]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.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html
[2] https://alethea.com/insights/how-state-actors-and-ai-slop-are-amplifying-data-center-revolt
It's propaganda-ception. (Score:2)
What's worse? The propaganda, or the propaganda about the propaganda? It's propaganda-ception. "Oh, all the bad news about datacenters is totally generated by China. Because they want us to fall behind. Don't believe it."
Do propagandists propagandize each other? Are we dying, or we were only led to believe we were dying by propaganda fighting other propaganda? Do we even exist? Or are we just propaganda machines all the way down?
Re: (Score:2)
So are you saying that these articles were actually domestically generated, but designed to seem like they were both foreign-generated and disguised to look domestically generated, so people would refuse to let foreign state actors trick them into protesting data centers, and instead embrace the data centers along with the higher electricity prices and other side effects?
Or maybe they actually were foreign generated, but designed to seem domestically generated to seem foreign generated to seem domestically
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is the people that fall for this crap. Too many voters with no brains.
Re: (Score:2)
Democracy's downfall is that the largest voting demographics are the least educated, least critical-thinking, and most responsive to charisma and lies.
America works around this by rejecting "pure democracy" and ostensibly operating as a constitutional republic, while actually operating as an oligarchy. It means the people who make all the really important decisions are un-elected and loyal only to themselves, but also (most of the time, at least) in one of the upper echelons of the intelligence/education p
Disinformation damages everybody. (Score:2)
I'm not a great believer in a massive rush for AI data centres. They will be overbuilt and building early increases the damage. However, there are clearly better ares for them - for example Scotland and there are clearly worse ares for them - for example the US has such a disfunctional power system that it is having to increase coal power in order to build this up.
Having this outside interference means that data centres will be built in a panic in the US, where long term it's impossible to provide cheap pow
Re: Disinformation damages everybody. (Score:2)
The energy problem isn't a long term problem. [1] Smaller, on-site nuclear is coming. [interestin...eering.com]
And, though it may annoy many readers here, Trump is part of this push. I'm sure that after decades of demanding more modern nuclear reactors that suddenly Slashdot will recoil in horror and demand we burn whale oil or some such.
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/energy/aalo-criticality-data-center-nuclear-reactor
Re: (Score:2)
Good: Nuclear reactors, hey even I can admit that if the policy is working
Bad: Illegal tariffs, illegal forever war in Iran, scuttling his own signature trade deal, "100 deals in 100 days", responsible for 27% of total US debt, stagnating economy, billions in insider trading, illegal bribery schemes via crypto, backdoor dealing to his own family and friends, try to push coal just as hard as nuclear, if not harder, using taxpayer money to cancel renewable energy projects, pardoning 70+ criminal fraudsters wh
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> Smaller, on-site nuclear is coming.
It has been coming for decades. It will be coming decades from now. Nuclear power is very expensive and unable to compete with more reliable and stable alternatives like battery backed wind power. Plant efficiency improves with scale, reducing this problem, and so gigawatt level power plants up to 5GW are just inevitable. The exception will be military applications and possibly small special cases such as mid sized isolated islands or the Antarctic.
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> Nobody is benefitting from this.
Nobody is benefitting from irrationality. In fact, it does extreme damage. Yet we have tons of it.
They're not wrong (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
A sense of proportion might help:
- Data centers use water yes, but people waste way more water than that pointlessly on their lawns. There's no mass movement against that, but it would be more helpful if there was. (yes, it's more nuanced and complex than this. DCs should be resourceful and not mess up groundwater)
- It's being used for surveillance-state AI, but that was happening anyways, and it makes the US a lot of money as an export. It's *ALSO* being used by nerds to vibe code flight sims, and business
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They're lying to their investors, and quite possibly, to themselves. I don't think they have some massive surveillance plans baked in to these datacenter build outs. To me, that implies they've thought that far ahead, and I honestly don't think they have. Instead, they seem to be in the "Field of Dreams" mode... "If we build it, they will come!"
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Yeah, it's probably wrong. Especially if its coming from wumao and/or Russian troll farms.
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You certainly aren't wrong. The imposition of authoritarian measures in Western countries, like Chat Control in the EU and age verification in the UK is very much to do with the need of AI companies to be able to identify who are real people and which "people" are actually other AIs so that the latter don't poison their training data.
we like troll farms now? (Score:2)
Sure seems like people around here were hopping made about foreign disinformation campaigns a few years ago. How interesting.
But (Score:2)
Are they wrong?
Framing (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if it's bad - if China and Russia agree it's bad you have to be for it.
You can never agree with China because they have a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State there so you must support a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State here.
If you are against techo-feudalism you must be one of them Putin Lovers.
- The New York Times / Langley, apparently.
and? (Score:2)
Every nation does this, they mock the failures of their adversaries. We do it constantly relating to China and Russia. So what?
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> especially evidence on the same scale
This is exactly the point. Sure, everybody does propaganda. However, Trump telling everyone he's the greatest because he "aced" three dementia tests doesn't have exactly the same effect as troll centers of thousands of people and bots commenting all over the internet.
When X opened up the locations their accounts were based in we didn't suddenly discover millions of US based accounts pretending to be Chinese or Indian. We did find thousands of accounts from India and other China and Russia friendly, low law
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The problem is the low education standards in the US. They clearly have them to keep their own population better under control, but they also make attacks like this much, much easier.
Re:and? (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Do you, now?