China as scapegoat for the data center fight

A new story from Wired by Molly Taft is tracking something ugly in the data center debate: a lot of tech leaders and their allies are using China as the boogeyman. They argue the buildings are needed for AI, so the only real threat is foreign competition. The problem, as Taft puts it, is a lack of evidence for the claim.

Polls show that overwhelming majorities of Americans hate data centers. They're ugly, they guzzle power, they strain the grid, and they're usually built in places where the locals didn't ask for them. China makes a convenient target because it's abstract enough that nobody in the room has to explain what it actually does.

This is the same playbook you've seen before. Whatever the real issue is—land use, water, grid capacity, NIMBY pushback—it gets reframed as a national security fight. China is the perfect cover. The result is that the actual question, whether a project makes sense for the community, gets buried under the flag.

Why this matters for us: when the data center fight gets hijacked by a foreign boogeyman, the real issues—power bills, water, neighborhood impact—are the ones nobody talks about, and la gente takes the hit.