By Steven Lee Myers and Dustin Vols | New York Times
A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans’ physical and financial well-being.
A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet — created with OpenAI’s ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said — circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash.
A video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure. “The country’s electrical grid instability may render it useless,” the video’s narrator says.
All are examples of a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence — verging at times on hostility — about the spread of the data centers needed to power A.I. in the United States and elsewhere.
Court Rich, Rose Law Group Co-Founder and Energy and Utility Infrastructure Department Director, tells RLGR,
“At a time where success in AI development could literally make the difference in a country’s future standing in the world, it should surprise no one that our nation’s adversaries are spreading doubt and misinformation on line in hopes that America squanders its advantage in AI and loses its place in the world.
Whether you like AI or fear it, it seems obvious that we should want to be more advanced and remain ahead of our adversaries in something that could be so transformative.”
