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.