The nation’s data center battles are the front line of a quiet, Beijing-linked influence campaign.
Wikimedia Commons TL;DR
A Shanghai-funded network has spent five years organizing on-the-ground campaigns against U.S. data centers, with California serving as a critical staging ground. It’s part of a broader Chinese effort to slow American AI development, underscoring the need for scrutiny of who’s bankrolling local opposition.
From the border to the Bay, a war is raging for California’s future. And the latest battleground is artificial intelligence. This fight is so consequential, both for California and the nation, that even foreign actors are getting involved. As documented by The New York Times, countries like China are actively targeting America’s AI buildout. And as Garry Tan outlined earlier this month, they are targeting California in particular.
Understanding California’s historical role as a bellwether state is essential to understanding why.
At the height of San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” in 1967, Stanford Professor Wallace Stegner observed: “Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic—only more so.” Any American who has set foot in the Golden State knows this to be true.
California is our country’s creativity, consumerism, and ambition distilled in its most potent form. It is the western edge of the western frontier, both geographically and technologically. California is where the future happens first and where that future spreads to the rest of the country.
Unfortunately, America’s adversaries recognize this as well. They know that California is a trendsetter for U.S. policy and politics. So they expend significant resources to exert foreign influence on the state’s current and future leaders, exploiting Californians’ legitimate concerns about the changes AI will bring to serve their own strategic ends.
The record here spans decades. In the 1970s, a young Los Angeles activist named Karen Bass, today the city’s mayor, made repeated trips to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, a political program hosted by the Castro government that the FBI regarded as a recruitment vehicle for Cuban intelligence. This May, Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang resigned her office before pleading guilty to acting as an illegal agent of China, having been recruited by Beijing to spread CCP propaganda. And from Venice, CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans leads an organization currently under federal scrutiny for alleged ties to China.
Evans, CodePink, and the broader nonprofit ecosystem they operate in are especially relevant to understanding China’s efforts to undermine America’s AI buildout. Evans is a key node in the Singham network, a collection of CCP-aligned activist groups that have been at the vanguard of the anti-data-center movement here in the United States. The network is financed by the Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham, who is Jodie Evans’ husband, a lifelong Marxist, and the subject of multiple federal investigations into his suspected ties to the CCP, including an ongoing criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York.
In Singham’s operation, California acts as a crucial artery in the anti-AI movement. Evans reportedly splits her time between Los Angeles and Shanghai. From her perch in Venice, she serves as co-founder of CodePink and as the president of the People’s Support Foundation, the grantmaking vehicle at the center of the Singham network. As Singham’s wife, she has helped steer funds to nonprofits like the People’s Forum, which House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith described as “a likely CCP-funded propaganda arm operating under tax-exempt status”. Since 2017, working in concert with Evans, Singham has funneled $278 million to nonprofits that have been campaigning against data centers and U.S. export controls on semiconductors.
I wrote a Bitcoin Policy Institute report that uncovered this foreign influence campaign in full. Part I of our research documented how Beijing’s English-language propaganda outlets, including CGTN, China Daily, and Global Times, have been warning Americans that AI data centers would send their electricity bills “skyrocketing,” even as Beijing cut the power bills of its own AI data centers in half. Our report also showed how the Singham network spent five years parroting the same message to Americans at home, from dossiers quoting China’s Foreign Ministry verbatim to CodePink campaigns against specific American data centers. This message amplification was in keeping with an established pattern of close collaboration between Singham nonprofit leaders and Chinese state media, which over the years, has included podcasts and exclusive print and television interviews.
Part II of our research tracked the Singham network’s on-the-ground mobilization against data center projects across the U.S. Singham’s footsoldiers organize through his primary political vehicle, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, an explicitly Marxist-Leninist organization that advances positions aligned with the Chinese government, amplifies its messaging, and seeks to abolish the U.S. government through revolutionary means. A significant share of the PSL’s funding is exempt from public reporting, meaning the American public cannot see whether China or any other foreign actor is bankrolling this nationwide mobilization. Our research tracked 21 separate PSL campaigns across 14 states, where the party served as either the lead organizer or one member of a broader coalition in efforts that delayed, scaled back, or blocked approximately $23.6 billion in proposed AI infrastructure investment. Those campaigns contributed to 4 rejected or scrapped data center projects, 10 data center moratoria, and 1 permanent ban.
The permanent ban was enacted right here in California. PSL’s Los Angeles chapter organized with the No Data Centers SGV Coalition to help lead teach-ins, a roughly 4,500-signature petition, and a ballot campaign against a 250,000-square-foot project. The developer withdrew its application in March 2026, and in June, Monterey Park banned data centers for good. The coalition’s organizing then rippled into data center moratoria in nearby El Monte, Baldwin Park, and Montebello and a zoning ban in Alhambra.
The stakes in the AI race could not be higher. Whichever country dominates this industry will control the information layer of the global economy, which is why China and CCP-aligned activist groups have gone to such lengths to slow the buildout of American data centers. So far, they and their degrowth allies in the United States are succeeding. Social media has acted as a gain-of-function mechanism for the anti-data-center mind virus, turning doomer memes into doomer policy with Senator Sanders’ proposed federal data center moratorium and New York’s recently enacted data center moratorium.
But a degrowth victory is not inevitable. Transparency is the greatest threat to the foreign influence campaign boosting the anti-data-center movement. Every citizen at a city council hearing on a data center, whether in California or anywhere else, should ask a simple question: who is funding the campaign? Concerns about water and power bills are authentic and deserve real debate. But this debate should take place among neighbors. It should not be subsidized from Shanghai.
Beijing’s foreign influence operators frequently target California because they believe, like Stegner, that where California goes, America will follow. Joan Didion, writing about the Golden State, put it even more sharply: “things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” There is no next California to retreat to. That’s why winning this fight, and unlocking the abundance this technology promises, matters more than ever.
Sam Lyman is the head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and a former senior adviser and chief speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
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