Is China Sabotaging America's Data Centers?

Authored by Lipton Matthews via American Greatness,

China is the one foreign power with both the resources and the strategic incentive to shape American technology.

Washington’s preoccupation with foreign influence has become almost reflexive, though curiously selective in its targets. Some lawmakers have built entire political identities around scrutinizing the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. Similarly, journalists trace Qatari money through American think tanks, and analysts fervently scrutinize Gulf investment in universities and sports franchises. Yet China, the one foreign power with both the resources and the strategic incentive to shape American technology and energy policy, occupies a curiously small share of this scrutiny. Given the evidence now available, that imbalance deserves correction.

Neville Roy Singham makes for an instructive starting point. Having sold his software consulting firm for hundreds of millions of dollars, Singham relocated to Shanghai, where he now works from an office shared with a Chinese media company whose stated mission is promoting Beijing’s narratives to foreign audiences. From that base, he has directed substantial funding toward a cluster of American nonprofits, including The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, and BreakThrough News, whose output consistently aligns with the positions of the Chinese government on major geopolitical questions. A visitor to his office once documented a banner reading “Always Follow the Party,” a detail that leaves little room for ambiguity about the network’s orientation.

What transforms this from an unusual biography into a matter of genuine political consequence is the organization that carries this network’s influence into American civic life. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) openly calls for the replacement of the American government through revolutionary means rather than electoral politics, and its senior leadership is drawn almost entirely from the executives who run Singham’s nonprofits. 

The party’s 2024 presidential nominee, Claudia de la Cruz, co-founded The People’s Forum. Her running mate directs one of Singham’s grantmaking bodies. Separately, the editor of BreakThrough News sits on the party’s central committee. This is not a loose ideological affinity between separate organizations. It is the same leadership operating under different institutional names.

That leadership has directed considerable energy toward one particular front, the American buildout of AI infrastructure. Across 21 documented campaigns in 14 states, the party has served as either the lead organizer or a significant participant in efforts that produced 10 local moratoriums, one permanent ban, and billions of dollars in delayed or canceled data-center investment. In Charlotte, party organizers ran a sustained door-to-door campaign ahead of a unanimous council vote to pause new data-center construction. In Prince George’s County, they trained residents to pressure local officials and helped build a petition that gathered 20,000 signatures before the county moved to halt permitting.

It would be a mistake to characterize the underlying opposition as manufactured. Concerns about water consumption and rising electricity costs are genuine and widely shared. But real grievances offer convenient cover, and an organization with documented financial ties to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-aligned network has positioned itself at the center of that anger while disclosing almost nothing about its own funding, since it maintains no registered nonprofit status and files no public financial statements for its general operations.

This pattern of quiet institutional penetration is not confined to street-level activism. It reaches into the universities that train the next generation of American policymakers. Tax filings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that Energy Foundation China, a nonprofit led by former Chinese government officials, sent $1.2 million to Harvard University and four campuses within the University of California system in 2024, nearly double what it had given the year before. The group’s chief executive previously served as a senior Chinese government climate negotiator, and the chairman of its board once worked as a director for China’s national legislature.

Its own staff roster reads like a directory of former Chinese state officials, including a one-time senior figure at the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau and a former manager of overseas infrastructure projects for a subsidiary of a state-run industrial conglomerate. One watchdog group described the organization bluntly as nothing more than an influence operation of the CCP.

The funding pattern is telling in its own right. Since 2020, the group has funneled more than $15 million into American universities and nonprofits while spending over $200 million domestically in China, a ratio that undercuts its public claim to be a nonpartisan charity focused solely on emissions reduction. Its money has also flowed to advocacy organizations that shape federal energy regulation directly, including a Washington research group that champions electric vehicle mandates and a Colorado think tank behind efforts to restrict gas stoves. Taken together, the strategy looks less like philanthropy and more like an attempt to steer American energy policy toward technologies that China already dominates, a shift that would deepen rather than reduce American dependence on Chinese manufacturing.

None of this activity occurs in isolation from the digital sphere. OpenAI’s own security researchers recently disclosed that they banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts operating from China, likely tied to a private firm serving provincial government clients, whose purpose was to generate social media content blaming data centers and artificial intelligence for rising household electricity bills. This material was not crudely fabricated. It was crafted to blend seamlessly with legitimate reporting on regional power pricing, complete with matching hashtags intended to blend inauthentic commentary into an authentic public conversation.

A related cluster pursued a parallel objective, producing cartoons critical of American tariff policy while explicitly instructing the model to depict only President Trump and to exclude any images of Xi Jinping, ensuring that blame for economic tension landed on a single, familiar target. This same network has been linked to accounts spreading false claims that ChatGPT user data had been compromised, an apparent attempt to erode public confidence in a leading American AI company, a tactic that closely resembles earlier Chinese campaigns against Western firms working to reduce dependence on Chinese rare earth supply chains. It is worth pausing on one particular irony here. These operators chose to use an American AI system to generate propaganda undermining trust in American AI, rather than relying on any of China’s own domestic models.

Three separate strands of evidence now point toward the same conclusion from three different directions.

• One traces institutional funding, nonprofit leadership, and political organizing through American civic institutions.

• Another traces academic grants flowing quietly into Harvard and the University of California from an organization run by former Chinese officials.

• A third traces synthetic content, banned accounts, and coordinated amplification through American social media platforms.

All three converge on a single strategic objective: eroding public confidence in the infrastructure, institutions, and companies that underpin America’s position in energy and artificial intelligence.

None of this justifies treating every data-center protester, university researcher, or critic of AI policy as an unwitting instrument of foreign interference.

The vast majority of them are not.

But when a Shanghai-based financier’s nonprofit network, a revolutionary political party sharing its leadership, a Beijing-linked climate group funding elite American universities, and a state-linked propaganda operation all converge on adjacent fronts within the same narrow window of time, that convergence constitutes a pattern rather than a coincidence.

It is a pattern that has, so far, received far less attention than it warrants and one that deserves a far more prominent place in America’s ongoing conversation about who is trying to shape its politics from abroad.