75% Americans don't want a data centre near them. The answer they got: blame China
A year ago, 42% of Americans said they'd oppose a data centre in their area. Now it's 75%. Instead of asking why, some tech leaders and politicians found a simpler explanation: Chinese bots.
Somewhere near you, someone wants to build a hall full of computers. It needs land, water and a lot of electricity, and it hires fewer people than a supermarket. Polling shows as many as 75% of Americans would oppose one being built in their area — up from 42% a year earlier. That is a rare thing in American life: a topic where three quarters of people agree.
In late August, X said it had found 200 accounts linked to China spreading anti-data-centre talking points. Axios wrote that "China is secretly fueling America's data center rage." President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement," and added: "let Data Reign!" The story travelled fast. The evidence behind it did not travel with it.
Here is the part that got lost. X said the same bot farm contained 200,000 accounts in total. The 200 anti-data-centre ones were a drop in the bucket — about one account in a thousand. And OpenAI, which banned a similar cluster in June and said it was linked to the Chinese government, wrote in its own report that those accounts were simply exploiting discontent that already existed. Not creating it. Riding it.
Graphika, a social media analytics firm tracking data centre sentiment online, told WIRED in June that most of the opposition it had seen was homegrown. This week its vice president of intelligence, Tyler Williams, said that hasn't changed: still very little evidence of significant foreign intervention.
The anger is local. The explanation was imported.
Why it matters beyond the argument itself: when the industry decides your objection is a foreign talking point, it never has to answer the objection. The electricity bill, the water, the fact that a finished data centre employs very few people — none of that gets addressed, because officially you didn't think it up yourself. That is the mechanism worth watching. A movement that gets labelled as foreign influence loses its right to a reply.
Anyone whose town is on a shortlist for one of these buildings — and that list is getting longer. It also lands on people just starting out: the Financial Times covered how AI has driven high unemployment for college graduates in Texas, a state with one of the largest numbers of data centres in development. So a 23-year-old there gets the power lines and the traffic, and a worse job market at the same time. And it touches people already inside the buildings: WIRED's Paresh Dave reported on Meta's push to build a robot workforce in data centres. He noted that some data centres have cafeterias with full kitchen staff — and as sites automate, operators save on food and janitorial services too. Those are not engineering jobs disappearing. Those are cooks and cleaners.
WIRED says a massive new influx of state legislation around data centres is heading into the 2026-2027 legislative year, per The Washington Post — that's where you'll see whether the anger converts into rules. Watch also Arkansas, where the utility Entergy tried to get a restraining order against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after it published details of a data centre deal with Google obtained through a records request, and dragged the young mother who filed that request into court. Blogger Andy Masley has publicly asked for any solid insider information about Chinese intervention; he says nothing solid has come in yet. No deadline was given for any of it.
Officials in the Trump administration complain that Chinese firms are stealing American advances in AI. At the same time, the story goes, China is working to block the buildings that train those models. Both can't be the priority. "Americans often find it easier to put the blame on a nebulous other, rather than to actually look at themselves," WIRED's Louise Matsakis says. The next time a mayor tells a packed hall that the opposition is foreign, ask who counted.
Sources: WIRED, "Why China Is the Bogeyman Data Center Enthusiasts Just Can't Quit" by Molly Taft, September 6, 2026.
Доля американцев, готовых выступить против дата-центра рядом с домом, за год выросла с 42% до 75%, и вместо ответа на это индустрия и политики валят недовольство на китайских ботов — хотя аналитики говорят, что протест домашний.
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