“Antifa”. “Commies”. “Chinese bots”. Everyone from tech leaders to the president has called datacenter resistance a “ documented psyop ” and a “ Chinese PR thing ”.
But why do they make these claims? Our new research finds that the datacenter industry uses propaganda, disinformation, and information control to mold public opinion and undermine community opposition.
Big tech’s opening pitch about datacenters was typical: they told Americans that these facilities brought jobs and tax revenue . They spread this message through mailers , text messages , TV spots and targeted digital ads .
But much of the spending behind these multimedia campaigns flowed through opaque non-profits and dark money groups with tech industry ties, hiding the source of these efforts. Groups like “ Elevate New Mexico ” have passed themselves off as local initiatives while obscuring their connections to corporate entities in the datacenter space.
As environmental concerns mounted, the industry turned to misdirection and jargon to obscure datacenters’ impact.
Developers continue to use terms such as “ closed-loop cooling ” and “ behind-the-meter power ” to deflect concerns about water and power consumption. But while these approaches can mitigate consumption, the effect is smaller than often implied: closed-loop systems may simply shift demand for water up the supply chain to power plants, while behind-the-meter generators still rely on the grid for backup and stability while competing with it for components.
And those industry figures about job creation? They are often presented without any context.
To give an example, an ad by Build American AI – an industry advocacy group connected to Lead the Future, an industry Pac funded by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz – boasts that datacenters have created 57,785 jobs in Texas.
But industry figures can also be misleading: of the promised jobs, how many are permanent jobs remaining after construction? How many are cafeteria workers, landscapers, and custodial staff – who often work for subcontractors without benefits? And are those subcontractors included when industry reports the average salaries for the jobs they do create?
A similar story applies to other tax benefits. When companies mention the tax revenue they bring to communities, they rarely include the exemptions and abatements they received.
Those incentives are often unnecessary to attract projects and eat directly into budgets for schools and social services. Some jurisdictions even track the precise number of dollars they forgo through such abatements.
But even when agreements allow communities to claw back money from underperforming projects, local leaders are often hesitant to do so because they don’t want to admit a project has failed. In other words, accountability is rare.
The industry fights to keep critical details about projects under wraps, sometimes working with local authorities to do so. In The Dalles, Oregon, for example, Google paid the city’s legal fees after it withheld records about a datacenter’s water use. (The city agreed to release the information in a settlement with the Oregonian newspaper.) Most datacenters do not report their water consumption at all, hampering policymaking. As for the public, their visibility into the process is limited by non-disclosure agreements.
Local and state officials, operating in a low-information environment and starved of resources by anti-tax policies, welcomed these facilities at first. The public has been more skeptical. With time, some government officials have joined them.
Yet, local organizers and activists told us that they now see decisions about their economic future as pre-determined by big business and opaque governments. They criticized the lack of transparency, the late stage at which the public was consulted, and community benefits agreements they felt were inadequate compared to the burdens they were being asked to bear: higher electric costs, air pollution, noise, water depletion, and a change in the character of their communities.
Industrial tycoons have historically manipulated leaders, laws, and regulations to their advantage. This time, though, resistance has been fierce.
Perhaps that is why the industry has stooped to smearing its opponents as useful stooges of foreign propaganda. In May, Kevin O’Leary – the millionaire Shark Tank star who is developing one of the world’s largest datacenters – called two activists “proxies for the Chinese government”. He later admitted he had “ no evidence ”. Even so, similar theories have gained traction among tech executives and Washington policymakers. And it has percolated to the local level, where activists and organizers tell us they face this invective – and much more – online.
The irony is that datacenter proponents are often the ones relying on disinformation and other information manipulation tactics to make their case. Government decision-makers should not give credence to top-down claims from Silicon Valley or the broader datacenter industry suggesting community opposition is somehow propelled by China.
Instead, policymakers should create and enforce mandatory transparency requirements and other provisions forcing datacenters to keep their promises and provide critical data about resource consumption, job creation and other matters of public concern. Those transparency requirements should extend to the permissive environment for advertising and campaign finance in which disinformation and coordinated astroturf movements thrive.
As usual, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Samuel Woolley is the Dietrich chair of disinformation studies and directs the Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) at the University of Pittsburgh
Dean Jackson is a senior fellow at the Communication Technology Research Lab and a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press
Maia Woluchem is the director of Data & Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures Program and a research fellow at the Communication Technology Research Lab
