Gov. Kathy Hochul slammed the brakes on New York’s data center boom Tuesday, handing China a gift-wrapped win in the global tech arms race.
A report stated she would sign an executive order that freezes state permitting for massive AI server farms. It halts new hyperscale data center approvals and orders state regulators to establish rules on energy use, water consumption, and other environmental impacts before any more projects move forward. Hochul framed it as consumer protection, saying she couldn’t sit by while server farms threaten to increase utility bills and drain New York’s water supply.
But tech industry backers say the real story is who’s actually driving the anti-data-center movement — and it isn’t people worried about their electric bills.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie and fellow Republicans recently fired off a letter to the FBI and White House science advisers demanding answers on what they call a coordinated foreign influence campaign involving China.
“Investigations by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) and Power the Future (PTF) have exposed new information regarding how foreign influence campaigns — many originating from China — have engaged in a coordinated effort to slow U.S. growth in AI development and the building of infrastructure supporting AI data centers,” they wrote. “Equally sinister, PTF’s report details how billionaire donors filter money through a complex financial web to fund America’s non-profit ecosystem — often with strong political or ideological leanings — to skew public opinion against the buildout of AI data center infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI reported catching Chinese-linked bot networks using ChatGPT to gin up fake outrage over electricity prices.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum didn’t mince words, declaring, “Any place that’s trying to build data centers is getting bombarded with foreign-directed propaganda to try to block these from being built.” Investor Kevin O’Leary, backing a $100 billion Utah project, said his team traced suspicious social media surges to what he flatly called “the CCP at work.”
A Facebook group with 170,000 members, “Say NO to Data Centers,” has also become the online engine of the resistance. Its digital mapping guru, George Duarte, who built a nationwide tracker of data center projects, moonlights as a strategist at a D.C. consulting shop whose client roster reads like the Democratic Party’s who’s who — the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC, and the Democratic Governors Association, as The Daily Wire reported.
Money trails lead straight back to George Soros. Records show Soros’ Open Society Foundations funneled more than $7.6 million to Indivisible, the activist network that has organized data center protests from Texas to California. Soros also poured $23.7 million into the Working Families Party — the same outfit now recruiting data center opponents to run for office in swing states.
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss chipped in too, routing another $1 million to Indivisible last year through his Berger Action Fund, according to tax filings. One watchdog group tallied more than $39 million in foreign money flowing to a dozen organizations fighting data centers nationwide.
Hochul’s Republican rival, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, wants local governments — not Albany — deciding whether to strike deals with tech firms. He argues the moratorium sacrifices jobs and cedes American ground to Beijing in the AI race.
For now, New York joins a handful of states flirting with similar bans — even as evidence mounts that the “grassroots” revolt against America’s AI buildout has some very well-funded and very foreign fingerprints on it.
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