OPINION:
From Chinese-controlled solar inverters to a covert influence campaign, data centers are the next battleground in the U.S.-China rivalry.
Michael Lucci, founder, CEO and Chairman of State Armor, joins Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to talk about China’s alleged influence campaign against U.S. data centers, the real environmental record and why winning the AI race matters.
[SADLER] This is the most heated debate going on domestically in the United States, where these data centers are going to be established, what the environmental impacts of them are. A lot of towns and states don’t want them. We saw Kathy Hochul ban basically for a year all data center construction as her team sorts through the information and misinformation. I know your group has done a lot of work on foreign adversaries like China getting on social media, spreading misinformation, using environmental groups as fronts, as covers, to make people scared of data center development. So can you talk to me about some of your findings and what you’re witnessing out there in this debate?
[LUCCI] What we find is that China seems to be beginning a broad influence campaign, as they’ve done on so many other related topics, such as American energy resilience. So I’ll give you a couple examples. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company, says that Chinese corporate interests have been using their tool, their intelligence, artificial intelligence tool, to develop campaigns to oppose data center construction in the United States and to oppose some kind of related issues as well. There’s also evidence that Neville Roy Singham, who’s under congressional investigation, potentially treasurer investigation for operating as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party and financing things on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, is pouring funds into some of this anti-data center activity as well. And then Chinese state media, in their English-language publications, have repeatedly published that they think data centers are a bad idea for the United States.
Obviously, Americans aren’t going to trust Chinese state media as a source, but what they’re actually doing is Chinese state media signals in the English language to affiliates and organizations that work on their behalf in the United States. And they’re basically saying, these are the talking points that we’re going to use against data centers in the United States. So we’ve seen at least those three vectors of the Chinese Communist Party trying to influence this debate within the United States. And furthermore, this is part and parcel of what they do. They’ve done it to the American energy sector. They do it to our industrial economy. They don’t want us to have those things that are necessary to 1) win wars, but 2) be really economically independent from the Chinese Communist Party itself. So they do this across other sectors of the economy, they have in the past. Energy is a big, obvious one. So this is just the Chinese Communist Party doing what the Chinese Communist Party does, which is to try to damage the United States industrial economy and artificial intelligence build out.
[SADLER] What are the most common narratives coming from the CCP so our viewers and readers can decipher, well, this is the line of the Chinese Communist Party, this is not real.
[LUCCI] What they like to do is to inflame debates that are already occurring. So they talk about water a lot. And there’s a lot of information about how much water might or might not impact the communities. So they talk about water a lot for sure. They also talk about electricity rates going up as well. And so a lot of these things are unverified, that it’s going to come out how the Chinese Communist Party says. And furthermore, there is some evidence that when you bring a data center online and they bring their own electricity, which is what President Trump is trying to get them to do at the national level, what Governor Abbott here is trying to get them to do, they actually become a net supplier of electricity to the rest of the grid because they take care of their own needs and then they sell the rest onto the grid. So there’s a lot of information coming out about data centers that is not true. And then the Chinese Communist Party likes to inflame that part of the debate to make people really get at each other’s throats on this type of topic.
[SADLER] Let’s talk about the water issue, because my mom raised it when I was in upstate New York just the other day, the environmental impacts of these data centers. I live in the state of Virginia. If you go to Loudoun County, you see these massive buildings. No one really knows what they’re doing in there, and then are concerned about water supply. Rightly so. I mean, Erin Brockovich has gotten on this and is saying that these centers aren’t safe. So can you talk to me a little bit about the environmental impact of these centers and what we know so far?
[LUCCI] The argument is that data centers first, that they consume a ton of water. And that argument is actually kind of falling apart. They’re not big consumers of water. And furthermore, they’re able to kind of get a set amount of water and just keep reusing that water. So that’s the first argument, is that they’re just consuming vast amounts of water. You know, research has come out, like they consume a tiny fraction of what golf courses consume, of what almond farmers in California consume. So that argument, that they consume too much water, is kind of falling apart.
So now they’re pivoting towards, okay, well, they’re going to make the water really dirty for drinking. There’s really just not evidence of that yet either. Of course, we should be careful about anything that would cause any damage to the quality of our drinking water. We’re just not finding it yet. If folks want to look into that, that’s fine, but we shouldn’t base a decision on whether to shut down this sector of our economy based upon someone saying, well, maybe it could cause damage someday, somehow. I mean, you could make that argument indefinitely. You could always say, like, well, we should investigate this, we should investigate that. You need to have evidence that it’s causing some harm. You need to be able to test that evidence. And if it’s occurring, then you mitigate that. But if it’s not occurring and we haven’t seen strong evidence that this is occurring, then we have to regard it as, you know, an argument being made, but it’s not an argument that’s valid at this point.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
Read more:
- New laws amid public resistance could curb Virginia’s data center boom
- Republicans need a pro-growth case for data centers
- Hyperscale data center ban reeks of politics, hurts Americans
- Trump plugs states, utilities into pledge for Big Tech to pay for data centers’ energy bills
- Trump urges New York to reverse course on data centers after Hochul signs one-year moratorium
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