When the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language flagship, Global Times, lectures American readers about the “high energy consumption” of U.S. data centers, it isn’t because Beijing has developed a soft spot for our electric bills. It’s because every server farm we don’t build in Texas or Virginia is one China gets to build first.
That line isn’t an outlier. China Daily warns that “AI boom sends electricity bills in US skyrocketing,” Beijing’s state broadcaster CGTN has run videos pinning America’s rising power prices on “energy-hungry data centers,” and Russia’s RT and Iran’s Fars News are circulating nearly identical material aimed squarely at U.S. audiences. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), apparently undeterred, shared a stage this week with two CCP-affiliated academics to warn about “the existential threat of AI.” It’s a strange coalition: socialist senators and the Politburo, united by a single objective. Slow America down.
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The numbers explain why Beijing is so eager to slow us down. Data center investment accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025, even though the sector represents only 4% of the economy. Hyperscaler capital expenditures are nearing $400 billion a year. From 2017 to 2023, direct employment in the U.S. data center industry grew by more than 50%, and each direct job supports more than six others across the broader economy.
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In Abilene, Texas, the first Stargate site is a $500 billion partnership among OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX. It has put more than 5,000 construction workers on site and is paying electricians roughly $35 an hour, nearly double what local homebuilders can match. The Development Corporation of Abilene projects a $4 billion regional impact, and the five new Stargate sites announced this year will create more than 25,000 on-site jobs. This is what American reindustrialization actually looks like.
Now contrast that with the country we are racing. China’s installed power-generation capacity reached 3.96 billion kilowatts at the end of March 2026, up 15.5% year over year. In 2025 alone, Beijing added the equivalent of 40% of the entire U.S. electrical grid. Chinese data-center capacity is on track to nearly double to 60 gigawatts by 2030, with AI and high-performance computing already approaching half the total.
And while CCP propaganda outlets warn Americans that data centers are “energy-hungry” and “harmful,” Beijing’s local governments are slashing electricity bills by up to 50% for AI data centers that use domestic chips. Chinese projects can move from planning to operation in months, while U.S. projects take years, when they move at all. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy already accuses Beijing of “deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns” to steal American AI. Now China is exporting the doomer playbook back at us.
And the doomers are landing punches. According to Data Center Watch, $64 billion in U.S. data-center projects has already been blocked or delayed by local opposition over the past two years, with 142 activist groups operating across 24 states. Sen. Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, which would indefinitely freeze any facility above 20 megawatts. Maine is poised to enact the first state-level moratorium. Virginia Democrats are reviving legislation to layer site-assessment requirements onto every new build.
Let’s be clear about what this does. A moratorium does not pause AI. It pauses American AI. Every megawatt we do not bring online in Loudoun or Lubbock is one Inner Mongolia or Guizhou will gladly absorb, and Beijing will set the global rules that follow.
The Trump administration has the right idea. The July 2025 AI Action Plan rightly framed this as a race “just like we won the space race” and committed the federal government to streamlining permitting, opening federal lands, and cutting NEPA red tape. The president’s executive order accelerating federal permitting of data center infrastructure, with a 180-day target for qualifying projects, is a serious start.
But Washington cannot do this alone. A patchwork of state moratoriums and weaponized local zoning will undo every federal kilowatt unlocked. Congress should pass a national AI framework that preempts contradictory state rules, accelerates transmission and generation buildout, and protects communities from the tactical hijacking of permitting processes by groups whose talking points are now indistinguishable from those of Global Times.
The CCP isn’t subtle. The same week Global Times complained about the U.S.’s “data center boom,” it ran a triumphant feature titled “From robots to EVs to AI, a week of breakthroughs highlights China’s tech advances.” Beijing is telling its citizens to build, telling ours to stop, and laughing at the gap.
Sanders calls AI an “existential threat.” It is — but not the one he means. The existential threat is letting an authoritarian regime out-build, out-power, and out-train America while we tie our own hands. Everyone who cares about jobs, energy, national security, and the next century of free enterprise should treat the doomer-moratorium movement for what it is: a foreign-policy gift to Beijing, wrapped in American-sounding talking points.
If we want to win the AI race, we need to start acting like a country that means it.
Nathan Leamer is the executive director of Build American AI. He previously served as a senior aide at the Federal Communications Commission.
