From the Trump administration to Kevin O’Leary, there’s a new narrative that China is to blame for plummeting data center popularity

As negative sentiment toward data center construction reaches a fever pitch, some AI advocates are blaming China for emerging narratives around the rapid growth of the technology’s infrastructure—and the increased negative public attitude surrounding it. One of the people blaming China is billionaire investor Kevin O’Leary, who is backing a $100 billion data center project in Utah. Last month, the Shark Tank investor said he received an influx of “tens of thousands” of Instagram and X comments from the same batch of IP addresses, as well as “nefarious accounts from out of the country.” Additionally, some of the accounts, he claimed, were connected with Neville Roy Singham, a left-wing activist with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary claimed he reviewed public IRS tax filings that indicate Singham’s Shanghai-based connections funded anti-data center organizations like Alliance for a Better Utah and the Arabella Advisors. “There’s a war going on, I guess, a PR war,” O’Leary said in a social media video explaining how he believed foreign agents were fueling anti-AI social media campaigns. Regardless of how those comments came to land on his social media posts, Mr. Wonderful said China’s role in stoking AI data center discontent in the U.S. is obvious. “I’m not suggesting it,” he said. “It’s an irrefutable fact.” His comments come at a crossroads for tech researchers, who said that kind of rhetoric is doing more harm than good when it comes to building out that AI infrastructure in the first place. Instead, where AI proponents see an enemy, researchers of the politics surrounding data center construction see the potential for a convenient scapegoat. “China is a common and comfortable boogeyman in American politics, for right or for wrong,” Flavio Hickel, an assistant professor of political science at Washington College, told Fortune. China as a scapegoat Data centers have indeed been plummeting in popularity over the last several mont