China fueling anti-data center sentiment across US, Trump admin and Shark Tank star Kevin OLeary claim

The Trump administration and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary claimed anti-data center sentiments across the US are being fueled by a Chinese propaganda campaign.O’Leary — whose 40,000-acre data center plans outside Salt Lake City have been met with protests — claimed in a Monday video that “nefarious accounts out of the country” tied to China were spreading misinformation about his project as part of a coordinated attack on American AI infrastructure.Interior Secretary Doug Burgum agreed during a Tuesday appearance on Fox Business.“Any place that’s trying to build data centers is getting bombarded with foreign-directed propaganda to try to block these from being built,” Burgum said.“This is just another attack on the US and our ability to be competitive.” O’Leary backed his claims with “90 pages of evidence” which he said indicated “millions, hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of funds were being funneled from entities around the world to fuel targeted misinformation campaigns against his data center.And he isn’t the only one to arrive at such conclusions — at least three reports from tech and Trump-aligned thinktanks and non-profits, including the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Power the Future and the American Energy Institute, drew similar conclusions about Chinese meddling in US data-center sentiments in studies of their own.“The opposition to US data center construction is not a spontaneous grassroots movement,” a recent American Energy Institute report read.

“It is a coordinated campaign financed in substantial part by foreign donors, operating through a network of national advocacy organizations and their local chapters.”But at least two of the groups named in those reports told the Washington Post they had nothing to do with a foreign influence campaign against data centers — and that they were baffled by the allegations.“These reports are false, misleading and an attempt by big crypto special interests to ...