House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday that opposition to AI data centers is “coming from China,” calling the backlash a foreign influence operation rather than a genuine expression of local concern — a claim that runs up against polling and reporting showing deep, homegrown resistance to the facilities.
Johnson made the remark during an appearance on Fox Business, according to Breitbart, after host Cheryl Casone suggested China had been stoking the opposition. The Speaker did not hedge. “This is what Democrats do. Every election cycle they find something to glom onto and say that this is doom and gloom and everyone will die if we don’t win,” Johnson said. “Don’t buy it. This is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That’s not a conspiracy theory.”
Johnson’s framing places the data center fight inside a broader national security narrative about AI infrastructure, one in which the United States and China are racing to build the computing capacity that trains and runs advanced models. It also lands amid a wave of local pushback that has slowed projects in communities across the country.
What the polling shows
If foreign actors are driving the opposition, the numbers don’t make that obvious. A YouGov poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their local communities. A separate Gallup survey in May found that 71 percent of Americans were somewhat or strongly opposed to having a data center built near them — almost 20 percentage points higher than the share who opposed a nearby nuclear power plant, according to the New York Times.
The practical effects are visible. Data Center Watch reported that nearly 120 data center projects were either blocked or delayed across the United States over the past six months. Some cities and counties have enacted temporary or permanent moratoriums on new construction, the Times reported.
The reasons residents give are varied. Many cite broad concerns about AI’s effect on jobs and the climate, while people living near existing data centers describe them as eyesores that emit annoying sounds — complaints that have little to do with geopolitics and everything to do with what it feels like to live next door to an industrial-scale computing facility.
China and Russia ‘exploit,’ not manufacture
There is a kernel of truth in the idea that adversarial governments take an interest in American debates over AI infrastructure. Russia and China both have reason to see the United States tie itself in knots over energy-hungry server farms. But the distinction between exploiting a debate and creating one matters, and people who have worked on the issue draw it sharply.
Jessica Brandt, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under the Biden administration, told the New York Times in July that foreign actors are not the source of the controversy. “Foreign actors aren’t manufacturing American debates over the future of A.I., they are exploiting them,” Brandt said. The goal, she added, is to “deepen our divisions in order to dent our appeal and weaken us from within.”
That is a narrower claim than Johnson’s. It holds that Moscow and Beijing may amplify existing grievances — as they do across a range of domestic disputes — without being the ones who planted them.
A politically charged moment for AI infrastructure
Data centers have become an unexpected flashpoint in American politics. They are central to the buildout of artificial intelligence, consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, and generate tax revenue that some localities welcome and others find insufficient to offset the disruption. The result is a set of fights that cut across party lines — a dynamic that makes them awkward to slot into a simple partisan story.
Johnson’s decision to cast the opposition as a foreign operation effectively nationalizes the debate, framing local zoning objections and environmental complaints as the product of an adversary’s disinformation campaign. It is a striking assertion from the chamber’s top Republican, delivered in a friendly television interview, and one that arrives as his party navigates tensions between its ambitions for American AI leadership and the voters in its own districts who don’t want the facilities nearby.
Whether that argument lands is an open question. The Gallup and YouGov findings suggest the resistance is broad enough to include plenty of Americans who would not describe themselves as aligned with any foreign interest. And the stalled projects cataloged by Data Center Watch represent decisions made by local boards, county commissions, and city councils responding to residents who showed up to meetings — the ordinary machinery of American land-use politics.
Johnson, for his part, was unambiguous about his conclusion. “Don’t buy it,” he said of the opposition. “This is a Chinese psyop.”
The White House and congressional Democrats did not immediately respond to the Speaker’s characterization in the source material reviewed here. The debate over where to put the country’s AI infrastructure — and how much of the resistance is organic — is likely to continue regardless of who is blamed for it.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/28/mike-johnson-claims-opposition-data-centers-coming-china/