Foreign Psyops and the Data Center Backlash: What the Evidence Shows

Foreign influence operators did try to inflame America’s fight over AI data centers in 2026, but the public evidence shows a small, low-reach effort riding on top of a large, genuine and bipartisan domestic revolt, not a foreign campaign that created it. That distinction matters more than ever after November 3, when voters sided against data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures, according to CNBC’s count with Ballotpedia, and senior Republicans had spent the fall calling the opposition a “Chinese psyop.” This article sets out what has actually been documented by platforms, researchers, courts and government records, what has only been alleged, and what has been withdrawn. Every factual claim below links to the primary document or to the news organization that reported it.

TLDR

Three things are documented: a likely China-origin operation that used ChatGPT to pose as Americans complaining about power bills (OpenAI found no meaningful reach), a Russia-linked fake-news campaign against an AI data center in Armenia, and steady coverage of US data center fights by Chinese, Russian and Iranian state media. Researchers at Clemson, Graphika and elsewhere found the US-facing accounts had essentially no engagement and that domestic Americans lead the conversation. The bigger claims, that a Shanghai-based financier’s network or foreign “dark money” is driving the revolt, come from advocacy groups and Republican lawmakers’ letters and remain allegations, and one high-profile accusation was publicly retracted and is now the subject of defamation suits. Meanwhile the grievances behind the vote, from capacity-market costs to water and noise, are measurable in official data.

Thoughts

The foreign operations that have been documented are real, and they are tiny. OpenAI’s own June 2026 threat report, the most detailed public evidence anyone has produced, says the “Data Center Bandwagon” accounts “sought to exploit and amplify existing public concerns about energy prices and local impacts of data center development, but we found no evidence of meaningful breakout beyond its own activity.” When X announced in August that it had found a suspected Chinese bot farm, the company’s own post said just 200 of its roughly 200,000 accounts posted about “American AI and energy policy.” Clemson’s Darren Linvill, whose team checked those accounts, told PolitiFact that the ones overlapping OpenAI’s findings had no followers and no engagement before they were suspended. The honest description is a foreign megaphone pointed at a crowd that was already shouting. OpenAI’s Ben Nimmo said it best on a call with reporters, as quoted by CyberScoop: “The debate existed already.”

The political rhetoric went far beyond that evidence, and the same administration dismantled much of the federal machinery that could test it. House Speaker Mike Johnson said in September, as reported by Newsweek, “That is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That’s not a conspiracy theory.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC, according to the network’s own transcript excerpt, that “data centers don’t use water” and called the concern “propaganda by our adversaries.” Yet no public finding from the intelligence community, the FBI or the State Department ties foreign influence to the data center movement, and the federal capacity to make such a finding was cut back in 2025. As Just Security documents, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was disbanded in February 2025, the State Department’s counter-foreign-manipulation office was closed that April, and the Foreign Malign Influence Center was dismantled as a stand-alone body. The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment omitted foreign threats to US elections for the first time in nearly a decade, Defense One reported. It is hard to take “psyop” seriously as a diagnosis when the government has removed most of its own diagnosticians.

The Utah case shows what happens when attribution is treated as an insult rather than a finding. Kevin O’Leary, promoting a data center project in Box Elder County, said on Fox in May that named local opponents were “proxies for the Chinese government,” according to the Deseret News. On June 25 he posted that he had “no evidence” that any of them were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party, as reported by Fortune. The next day, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo read a statement that Fox News Media was “aware of no evidence” of Chinese funding, direction or coordination and “apologizes for the error,” according to a recording and transcript posted by Media Matters. Two defamation suits followed. NPR, meanwhile, checked the tax filings of one accused group, Alliance for a Better Utah, and found annual revenue of about $200,000, in line with the previous decade. A real foreign operation somewhere does not make an unrelated neighbor a foreign agent.

The strongest foreign-funding claims deserve a careful reading, because their own authors hedge them more than their headlines do. The Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Part II report says 21 Party for Socialism and Liberation campaigns in 14 states “contributed to” 10 moratoria, one ban and four rejected or scrapped projects tied to about $23.6 billion in proposed investment, and links the party to nonprofits funded by Neville Roy Singham, a US citizen living in Shanghai. But the same report states that it “does not assert that Singham funds the PSL,” “does not assert that members of the PSL are Chinese operatives,” does “not claim that opposition to data centers is wholly astroturfed,” and that whether any foreign actor finances the party “cannot be readily answered by the existing public record.” Judd Legum’s Popular Information, using BPI’s own data, calculated that the party was involved in about 2% of the jurisdictions that passed new restrictions. BPI’s author previously worked as public policy director at Riot Platforms, a digital assets and AI infrastructure company, as the institute’s Part I discloses. That is not disqualifying, but readers should know it, just as they should know that OpenAI builds data centers and that X’s owner runs an AI company.

What actually moved voters is visible in public data, and none of it requires a foreign explanation. Gallup’s March survey found 71% opposed AI data centers in their area, more than oppose a local nuclear plant. PJM’s Independent Market Monitor estimated that data center load added $29.4 billion to capacity costs across the region’s last four auctions. The opposition draws heavily on Republicans too: Ohio’s Conserve Ohio grew out of a Republican attorney’s fight over a secretive land deal, NPR reported, and Tea Party founder Amy Kremer’s group staged a “Data Center Revolt” bus tour. And the influence money in the midterms ran heavily the other way: a pro-AI group bought at least $2.54 million in Ohio TV ads, according to a DeSmog analysis of FCC filings. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Jessica Brandt put the whole debate in one sentence to PolitiFact: “Evidence of an attempt is not evidence of success.” The fair conclusion is that foreign adversaries would love America to stall its AI buildout and have tried, cheaply, to help. Americans did the voting.

Key Takeaways

OpenAI banned two clusters of likely China-origin ChatGPT accounts in June 2026. One, “Data Center Bandwagon,” posed as Americans and generated posts claiming data centers raise electricity costs. OpenAI assessed the operators as likely a social media team at a private Chinese tech company working for provincial-level government clients, and found no meaningful breakout.
X said in August it found a suspected Chinese bot farm of about 200,000 accounts, of which 200 posted about American AI and energy policy. Clemson researchers found the overlapping accounts had no followers or engagement.
Recorded Future documented three Russia-linked fake media videos in June and July 2026 targeting the Firebird AI data center in Hrazdan, Armenia, reaching more than 1.6 million combined views. It is the clearest facility-specific case, and it is not in the United States.
Alethea counted roughly 700 data center mentions in Chinese, Russian and Iranian state media from January to June 2026, and concluded foreign actors “did not create this grievance” but amplified it. Critics note most examples were reposts of US journalism.
Graphika told WIRED it had “not yet seen evidence of organized or scaled influence operations” on data centers traceable to a foreign actor, and that “domestic US actors are leading” the conversation.
Speaker Mike Johnson called the opposition “a Chinese psyop,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum blamed “foreign-directed propaganda,” and Under Secretary of War Emil Michael said adversaries would try to “psyop” Americans. None of them cited specific evidence, and Michael did not name China.
House committees and Sen. Tom Cotton asked the FBI, DOJ, Treasury and IRS to investigate foreign influence and funding. These are requests, not findings. No public finding has been issued.
Kevin O’Leary publicly said he had no evidence for his claims linking named Utah opponents to China, Fox News Media apologized on air, and the people he named have filed two defamation suits. The defendants argue the remarks were opinion.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute’s $23.6 billion figure is the proposed value of projects where a socialist party “contributed to” opposition. The report itself says it does not assert foreign funding of that party.
Federal counter-influence capacity was cut in 2025, and the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment omitted foreign threats to US elections for the first time in nearly a decade.
Ballotpedia counts at least 50 local data center measures in 13 states in 2026. Of 47 decided by November 4, 46 went toward greater limits.
PJM’s market monitor estimates data center demand added $6.27 billion to the 2028/2029 capacity auction and $29.4 billion across four auctions, though capacity charges are not the same thing as household bills.

Detailed Summary

What Counts as a “Psyop”

The word is doing too much work in this debate. A state-owned newspaper writing about American electricity prices under its own name is overt propaganda. A network of accounts pretending to be American parents is a covert influence operation. A Bangladeshi Facebook page posting AI-generated protest memes for clicks may be neither, just engagement farming. And a resident at a zoning hearing is a resident. Each requires different evidence: ownership records for the first, account and infrastructure data for the second, business-model evidence for the third. Proving one does not prove the others, and much of the confusion in 2026 came from treating them as one thing.

OpenAI’s Data Center Bandwagon Case

According to OpenAI’s report, the operators prompted ChatGPT in Simplified Chinese, posed “as Americans from a variety of backgrounds,” and generated English comments and images “claiming that data centers and AI applications were increasing electricity demand and causing higher costs for ordinary Americans.” The posts went out on X from likely inauthentic accounts “alongside links to legitimate news stories about the power grid operator’s capacity auctions.” OpenAI assessed the operators were “likely part of a social media operations team at a private Chinese technology company conducting work for Chinese provincial-level government clients.” It did not name the company, and CyberScoop noted OpenAI did not attribute the operation directly to the Chinese government. A second cluster, “Tech and Tariffs,” attacked US tech and trade policy and was linked to X accounts pushing false claims that ChatGPT user data had been compromised; OpenAI rated it Category One on the Breakout Scale, the lowest level. OpenAI’s own framing is that the significance lies not in shifting opinion “but because it shows PRC-origin influence operators testing narratives against AI infrastructure.” CyberScoop also observed that OpenAI “is not a neutral party,” since it is raising money to build US data centers.

X’s 200,000 Accounts, and the 200 That Mattered

X’s Global Government Affairs account wrote in late August: “We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.” The post published no methodology, account list or reach data. Linvill told PolitiFact his team found 70 accounts that appeared in both the X and OpenAI sets, all with no followers and no engagement. In a separate interview reported by The Next Web, he called the announcement a “non-story” and said “No real humans saw these posts about data centers.” University of Pittsburgh researcher Samuel Woolley noted in the same piece that every report he had seen on Chinese data center propaganda came from a Big Tech company with a “vested interest” in the buildout.

Russia’s Campaign Against Armenia’s Firebird Facility

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group assessed that the Russia-linked CopyCop network, also tracked as Storm-1516, “very likely” targeted the Firebird AI data center in Hrazdan, Armenia, ahead of its July opening. The three incidents began June 24 (a fake TechCrunch video warning of a magnitude 7.4 earthquake risk), June 30 (a video impersonating a real Gizmodo journalist claiming power-grid instability), and July 7 (a video impersonating Iranian military messaging that framed the site as a target). Reach grew “from limited initial engagement to over 1.6 million combined views by the third.” It is a genuine fabrication campaign against a specific AI facility. It tells us nothing about whether investors or residents believed it, and nothing about American towns.

State Media and the Amplification Ecosystem

Alethea’s research counted “roughly 700 mentions across Chinese, Russian, and Iranian state-run media” from January to June, about four a day, including about 46 Chinese articles contrasting Chinese compute success with US failure, and Facebook groups with names like “Life in Oklahoma” run from Bangladesh sharing AI-generated anti-data-center imagery. Its conclusion: “Foreign state actors did not create this grievance. They found it, layered state media narratives on top of it, ran covert fabrication operations beneath it, and let AI-generated content farms scale it.” Alethea also says plainly that “The opposition itself is real.” In a critique for Tech Policy Press, Grayson Richards argued that “nearly every example of foreign influence documented in the analysis amounts to translating, reposting, or re-editorializing the work of American journalists and researchers,” noted that Alethea sells its monitoring platform and declined to say whether data center firms are clients, and quoted Alethea saying its analysis “does not attempt to measure impact.” Stanford’s Graham Webster told WIRED it is “totally normal for the English-language Chinese media to pick up storylines that are in the US media.” Chinese outlets themselves were explicit: a Global Times piece quoted Axios that “organic opposition to data centers is very real” while accusing Washington of externalizing its own debates. Graphika told WIRED the Bangladesh-run pages may exist only “for monetization purposes.”

How the Accusations Entered Politics

On June 4, House Energy and Commerce chairs Brett Guthrie, John Joyce and Bob Latta wrote to the FBI and White House science advisers requesting information about evidence that “strongly suggests” foreign campaigns to slow American AI, citing reports by the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future. On June 10, Sen. Tom Cotton asked the acting attorney general to investigate, writing that “reports indicate” a network of foreign actors “led by the Chinese Communist Party” was trying to manipulate opinion, according to Fox News; Broadband Breakfast reports he also acknowledged Americans have “valid concerns” about energy costs. In September, Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith and China Select Committee Chair John Moolenaar asked Treasury and the IRS to examine whether overseas money flowed through US charities to block data centers, Fox reported; Smith said, “This is the Chinese helping throw the gasoline on the fire.” President Trump told Laura Ingraham “a lot of people say that it’s a China PR thing,” per PolitiFact. Emil Michael’s October remarks to Fox News Digital were general: adversaries will “try to psyop your population” and “to some degree, it’s worked.” Fox noted he did not name China. Rep. Steve Scalise said Republicans were “investigating whether China is behind a lot of this misinformation,” as relayed by MS NOW. NPR reported that the BPI report “offered little direct evidence that the campaign existed or was having much effect.”

The Singham Allegations, With the Responses

Neville Roy Singham, a software entrepreneur who sold Thoughtworks in 2017 for a reported $785 million, according to BPI, was the subject of a 2023 New York Times investigation into his funding of left-wing groups, as FAIR’s critique of that article describes. He has said he lives in Shanghai and is a US citizen, and in an October 2023 statement reported by The News Minute said, “I am not now and have never been a member of the Communist Party of China.” The media watchdog FAIR argued the Times piece “provides no evidence that either the philanthropist himself or the groups he funds are doing anything improper.” In June 2025, House Oversight Republicans asked the Justice Department for a briefing on whether entities he funds “may have engaged in activities at the behest of Beijing.” Fox News Digital has reported, citing its own investigation, that Singham “funneled $278 million” into a network of nonprofits since 2017 and that a Manhattan grand jury issued subpoenas in a probe of his network; no charges have been reported, and Singham did not respond to Fox. A Goldman Sachs spokesperson told Fox that all distributions from his donor-advised fund “were made to legal nonprofits, as determined by the IRS.” CodePink told the Washington Post that claims it is a mouthpiece of the Chinese government are “false and defamatory,” and a Wyss Foundation spokesperson said it “does not provide funding to block or oppose data centers,” as reproduced from the Post by Reader Supported News. Power the Future’s “Manufactured Outrage” report mostly concerns domestic and Swiss progressive philanthropy and argues the movement “may be bipartisan in its voters, but it is progressive in its architecture.” PolitiFact found no evidence for that report’s claim that the Sierra Club was formally investigated.

The O’Leary Lawsuits

On July 15, Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Joshua Kanter and Gabrielle Finlayson sued O’Leary and Fox News in federal court in Utah, alleging a “weekslong smear campaign,” KSL reported. In September both defendants moved to dismiss; O’Leary’s filing argues that on opinion programming “no reasonable viewer would take them as factual reports,” and Fox says it ran corrections on five programs after receiving a correction demand, according to the Deseret News. On October 14, Taylor Knuth, a former executive director of the alliance, filed his own suit for defamation and false light, KSL reported; Fox says it publicly corrected the record and will defend the case. These are allegations and defenses, not court findings. O’Leary Digital’s chief executive told KSL on October 1 that the project “is not on hold.”

The Grassroots, and the Other Side’s Astroturf

Local revolts predated the foreign-influence story. In Festus, Missouri, voters ousted all four council incumbents on April 7 with turnout 129% above the prior April, after challengers campaigned against a proposed data center, First Alert 4 reported. The Guardian found recall efforts over data centers in seven states in May and June alone. Reuters reported 142 protests in 42 states on July 18 organized by Kremer’s Humans First, as carried by the Gazette; Kremer told Fox the group will not accept funding that “advances a foreign influence operation” and that it received an initial loan from the Center for AI Safety, which it is repaying. Food & Water Watch says more than 500 organizations have joined its Stop Data Centers Coalition. The same Guardian report traced a Michigan website promoting a data center campus without naming its developer to political advocacy software and an account connected to a Michigan consulting executive, who denied her firm created it.

The Midterm Results

According to Ballotpedia, there were at least 50 local data center measures in 13 states in 2026, and as of November 4, “In 46 cases, a majority favored greater limits on data center development.” The lone November 3 exception was Harwood, North Dakota, where 75% of 430 voters rejected an added review of industrial projects, Route Fifty reported. A CNBC Voter Poll found 56% of voters called data centers a crucial or major factor in their decision. None of the post-election mainstream coverage reviewed for this article attributed the results to foreign influence. Meta President Dina Powell McCormick said afterward that “every hyperscaler is now thinking about ‘Do we need to build outside the United States?’,” as quoted by Gizmodo.

The Real Grievances: Power, Water and Noise

PJM’s July 2026 auction release reported $16.4 billion in cleared capacity, 6,831 MW short of its reliability requirement, while cautioning that the total “does not equate to the total cost to load.” The market monitor’s estimate that data centers accounted for $6.3 billion of it was first reported by Utility Dive. The EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook forecasts PJM wholesale prices up 41% in 2026. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2025 update estimates data centers “could account for 11.8% of total U.S. electricity by 2030.” Some research points the other way: a working paper by EPRI-affiliated authors estimates data centers caused average retail rates to “fall modestly” from 2015 to 2024, and PolitiFact rated Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “267%” bill claim Mostly False because it used wholesale prices. On water, LBNL’s 2024 report explains that “While air-cooled chillers use no water, they use more energy,” and estimates US data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters in 2023. Google’s own 2026 environmental report says it consumed 10.9 billion gallons in 2025. Mediaite surfaced a 2025 Lutnick interview in which he said AI data centers “suck water and they need water.” Virginia’s JLARC study found most facilities use about as much water as a large office building, that their low-frequency noise rarely breaks ordinances but affects some neighbors’ well-being, and that growing demand “will likely increase system costs for all customers.”

What Remains Unknown

Nobody outside the platforms can measure how much covert activity goes undetected, and OpenAI and X hold data outside researchers cannot reproduce. No public evidence connects a specific foreign operation to a specific permitting decision. Two OpenAI-related claims remain open: The Next Web reports that Chris Lehane’s pre-election memo to prospective 2028 candidates says OpenAI analysts found likely Chinese Communist Party influence operations posting that AI buildouts raise electricity bills, which appears to describe the same June operation that found no meaningful reach. And the Justice Department has not publicly confirmed the probe Fox has reported. Platforms continue to find election-focused foreign operations unrelated to data centers, including Russia-linked AI videos about Democratic Senate candidates reported by the AP, so the threat itself is not imaginary. The question is only whether it explains this particular revolt, and the evidence says it does not.

Notable Quotes

“This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn’t see any signs that it succeeded.”
Ben Nimmo, OpenAI, to reporters, via CyberScoop

“Foreign state actors did not create this grievance. They found it, layered state media narratives on top of it, ran covert fabrication operations beneath it, and let AI-generated content farms scale it.”
Alethea, in its January to June 2026 analysis

“That is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That’s not a conspiracy theory.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, on Fox Business, as reported by Newsweek

“It is natural from a propaganda standpoint that your adversary, who doesn’t want you to be developing super intelligence ahead of them, is going to try to psyop your population into believing that. And to some degree, it’s worked.”
Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, to Fox News Digital

“Our ongoing research indicates that domestic US actors are leading the online anti-data-center conversation.”
Dina Sadek, Graphika, to WIRED

“Evidence of an attempt is not evidence of success.”
Jessica Brandt, Council on Foreign Relations, to PolitiFact

“So whether China or any other foreign actor is financing the PSL cannot be readily answered by the existing public record.”
Bitcoin Policy Institute, in the same report that links the party to the Singham network

For the original technical evidence, read OpenAI’s June 2026 threat report here, and for the election itself, see our report on how voters rejected data centers in 40 of 41 ballot measures.