from the Where-can-I-get-a-bot-to-work-my-farm? dept.
The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States:
It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs.
This development comes after President Trump warned last month that "other nations are trying to get us to slow down" and are spending money on "propaganda" to convince Americans that data centers aren't a positive thing.
According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network were posting claims that data centers drive up household electricity prices and put excessive strain on the power grid. Some of the accounts, ironically, posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators getting rich while ordinary American citizens were stuck paying the bill.
[...] The insidious thing about this kind of foreign influence operation is that it preys on the concerns that many Americans already have about the data centers popping up in their communities – debates about things like electric bills and the robustness of the power grid are already happening here. All a foreign adversary like China has to do is amplify those fears and sow distrust to make it harder for the U.S. to keep building out its AI infrastructure.
Related:
- Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
- Texas Halts Data Center Connections to Power Grid Amid Overwhelming Demand
- The Fight Against AI Data Centers is Important – but It's Just a Starting Point
- 'Cost Me the Election': Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash
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https://www.newsweek.com/cost-me-the-election-data-centers-trigger-voter-backlash-12118327
A wave of voter anger over massive data center projects is beginning to reshape U.S. politics, with local officials and senior lawmakers losing elections after backing controversial developments tied to the artificial intelligence boom.
In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. "Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do," former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn't fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people's lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.
Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs . The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity.
For some, datacenter opposition may feel like the only tangible mechanism for registering their concern, disapproval, or even anger about AI. The problem is that this may be exactly what the AI companies are banking on. They can overcome the protest when it matters to them, and live with a significant fraction of proposals being defeated. More importantly, focusing political opponents on the datacenter issue obscures the bigger prize they're after.
While there is a staggering three-quarters of $1tn being spent on datacenter infrastructure by US companies this year alone, this investment should be taken in perspective . The market for enterprise software, for example, is about twice this size. And it's small compared with what these companies actually want.
AI companies have their eyes set on capturing all the value created by entire industries. The technology has arguably already conquered customer service and consumer sales. But on the horizon are bigger targets, such as enterprise software development, creative design, management and even legal services. In AI companies and their allies' vision of the future, AI replaces teachers and doctors . The companies would rather spend time fighting resistance to how fast they are building computing infrastructure than dealing with issues of how their products should be used in those fields, or how those fields should be protected from their products.
Governor who touted Texas as AI "epicenter" pauses data center grid connections:
Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the "epicenter of AI development," Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers—at least until developers provide more information about their projects' potential impacts on the grid and communities.
The Republican governor directed regulators in an August 3 announcement at the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to perform a "comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through ERCOT's interconnection process." As an independent system operator, ERCOT oversees a power grid that operates separately from the rest of the United States and provides services to most of Texas.
Texas has aggressively courted data center development with its availability of cheap land and relatively abundant energy resources, along with offering state incentives, like tax breaks and fewer regulations. That puts the state on track to surpass Virginia in becoming the largest US data center market.
But the recent AI boom and the accompanying frenzy of data center development threaten to overwhelm the Texas grid on paper, despite the state leading the country in adding new power generation. The ERCOT interconnection queue currently includes more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts' worth of requests to connect to the Texas grid—more than five times Texas' record peak electricity demand—and about 90 percent of those power connection requests come from data centers.
"That unprecedented load growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid," according to the statement from Abbott's office.
[...] The new directive from Abbott requires audits of data center projects that include how much data centers would depend on the ERCOT grid for power, along with obtaining projections of data centers' annual and peak electricity consumption. The directive further requires information on how much individual data center projects depend on state financial assistance, along with details on each data center project's ownership and controlling interests.
Abbott also directed state regulators and grid operators to discover the extent to which data centers' cooling systems and water usage may draw upon local water supplies needed by local communities. However, the governor's directive does not mention the fact that data centers often use much more water through their power generation sources than directly through their cooling systems—a fact highlighted by researchers like Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside.
Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
One week after the meeting, Salem announced a data center moratorium that would halt all data center developments in the city for one year as it considers zoning laws to accommodate developments such as this. This adds Salem to the long list of jurisdictions that have passed similar moratoriums, including Seattle, Washington, and the State of New York.
Unfortunately, the Verrus project will likely not be affected by this delay as it filed its application three days before the announcement. Despite this, Governor Tina Kotek (D) announced that Oregon will terminate a deal to sell a 32-acre plot of land that forms part of the three plots of land on which the project will sit. While it still leaves Verrus with approximately 43 acres, it means that it would have to go back to the drawing board to change its plans. This is similar to what Nashville did when it used its eminent domain power to deny the land that another developer wanted to use to build a data center near the historic Nashville Zoo.
But because Verrus submitted its application before the moratorium announcement, the city is still processing its proposed data center project. That does not mean that it will get an immediate green light, though. It still has to go through an extensive permitting process, which includes technical studies, permit conditions, and enforceable agreements, among others.
Oregon is one of the first states to enact a law that ensures large consumers, like data centers, pay for the majority of the grid upgrades needed to serve their needs. This allowed Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power provider, to increase the bills of users who used more than 20 MW by 30%, while also affecting a 1.3% cut in residential electricity costs. But despite this protection that stops ratepayers from price shocks, many people are still against data center projects in their towns and cities.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Snotnose on Sunday August 30, @07:03PM (8 children)
they don't actually use a boatload of electricity and water. Nor do the ad-hoc generators cause a lot of noise 24/7. Nor that all that electricity is essentially a space heater.
If you want one in your proverbial back yard then more power to you. But I don't want one anywhere near me.
Being the dumbest idiot in the land and president of the US should be 2 different people.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @08:46PM (6 children)
They do indeed use a boatload of electricity. That's unavoidable.
But the rest is optional. If they're allowed to, they can use significant water - though less than a lot of agriculture would use (for example, corn [soylentnews.org] or alfalfa [soylentnews.org]) - and make a lot of noise. If not so bothersome, well it's far from the worst thing that could be next door to you. Even normal residential areas can be a nuisance with noise, traffic, and runoff pollution.
It's so frustrating to deal with the same talking points over and over.
My view? Get the noise under control and have them pay for the infrastructure they use, then they would be among the best neighbors you could have.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @10:13PM (5 children)
When was the last time you ate AI?
I'd rather have a pantry full of food.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @11:05PM (4 children)
How many full pantries of food do you need? There's massive overproduction of food at present. And to give an idea of how misplaced that concern is, I found out while researching for previous SN discussions that in early 2025 global data center acreage was around 400k acres. Alfalfa acreage in the state of Utah was around 750-800k acres at the same time. So the state of Utah by itself had almost twice as much area devoted to growing a particular crop for livestock (though alfalfa can be used as part of a crop rotation since it's a legume), as the entire world had devoted to data centers. I see predictions that maybe data center area will triple by 2030 from the 2025 numbers. Sure, that's a substantial rate of growth, but it's temporary. They won't be doing that through the bursting of the bubble.
Sure, I get that people don't want to live next to a cooling system as loud as an airplane engine or pay high amounts for electricity. But I also get that banning data center construction when all you need is modest regulation to keep them in line. These aren't dangerous industrial zones. They just have relatively minor potential for nuisance that can be dealt with rationally. And aside from the spectacular electricity consumption, there isn't that much in the way of resource consumption or pollution generation from these things - some electrical waste and modest consumption of the stuff that's already been talked about.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @11:31PM (3 children)
When was the last time you NEEDED to eat, versus when was the last time you NEEDED AI?
NO one NEEDS AI... everyone NEEDS to eat.
Progress for stupids' sake is just stupid.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday August 31, @12:53AM (2 children)
I haven't NEEDED to eat in a long time. Sure, if I stop eating, I'd soon die. But there's long been plentiful food so that level of NEED never happened (aside from my first summer in college when I was trying to live on mac and cheese). My view is if I should live significantly longer than a normal human lifespan, hypothetically, it won't have much to do with a bit more land area for agriculture and everything to do with the advanced science and bioengineering which that better AI helped make possible.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @03:42PM (1 child)
Wish I could mod this post as "full retard"
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Monday August 31, @06:20PM
Sounds like I should be glad you can't. And perhaps you should be glad as well! For here is an opportunity for you to learn something.
First, let's consider what "NEED" means. Not dying, right? At first glance, food seems to be such a "NEED". You can't go more than a couple of weeks or so without dying. But the problem with that is that there's so much food production in the developed world that starvation just isn't a problem. Meanwhile someone at 20 years old, a common age for people who think they know what "full retard" can expect to live another 50-70 years on average. Current health care won't push it much more than that. It's more palliative theater than practical for the elderly. If you want to live another 100 or 100k years, it will NEED more than health care and undetectably more land devoted to agriculture.
AI, even the rudimentary stuff we have now, can help make that happen. NEED that ignores real world needs is bullshit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by arslan on Sunday August 30, @11:55PM
Maybe you're missing the point. Regardless of the preference, merits and economic "right" and "wrong" with building AI DCs here, the democratic system where masses can influence governance is being systematically exploited by another country for its own benefits - in this case the nation's competitive advantage in the AI race.
Specifically by a nation whose own system of government do not suffer from the same flaw due to their totalitarian nature and who is already attacking your nation on the other fronts of your nation building system - namely the capitalism side, such as funding frontier model building and dumping it for free, regardless of how you feel about the big western companies exploiting the market to create a bubble, they're sticking a knife in capitalism.
So regardless of how one feels about AI/genAI, some superpowers are taking it seriously and see the AI race as important as the other facets of the superpower superiority race. Yet here you are bickering amongst each other still.
(Score: 5, Touché) by SomeGuy on Sunday August 30, @07:50PM (4 children)
So has anyone identified the US bot farm that keeps spewing pro data center and pro AI crap? You KNOW this is out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @08:29PM
> So has anyone identified the US bot farm that keeps spewing pro data center and pro AI crap?
AWS, et al /sarc
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @08:47PM (2 children)
You should be able to find it, if it's out there.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @10:15PM
Found; it's X. And anything by Trump and his now richer buddies.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @01:08AM
Like, yeah! It's a lot closer than "out there". It's right here in the headline, spewing away. I mean, it's not they're a disinterested party or anything.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Fnord666 on Sunday August 30, @08:48PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @09:37PM (11 children)
I know this will really get some goats here, but I think it goes back further. The whole "woke" business has always reeked of Chinese psyop to me, I just can't prove it. What is America's hot button? Race. It was being pushed online to ridiculous proportions, and you don't even have to push the button very hard, because as soon as you push it the people who got their buttons pushed start pushing the buttons for you. Our foreign adversaries know that, and the original "whataboutism" was based on it. They went through a cultural revolution in China. They're jealous that we never sank in to that kind of chaos. They'd like nothing better than for us to sink in to a dark age while they run their nice orderly society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @09:52PM (4 children)
I suspect the same. It was even proven in the BLM protests where foreign adversaries would play both sides online to create more discord. Its not only China but Russia, Iran and anyone else who wants to play.
The counterbalance though, is why did our institutions adopt the policies willingly? While woke was used for information warfare, it was also an official position. A little of it can be excused by the same corporations bending to Trump, but that only goes so far.
Taking it further, much of the COVID response was also based on emulating China and for all intents was a psyop for nefarious purposes. They needed to use it as cover for their own internal issues like HK. Notice that all of that went away. But what did western countries need it for? The information about the lethality of the virus was settled early on during those cruise ships.
Now these datacenters are being pushed and I don't believe that it's all for generative AI. It's not that it will drink up all the water or electricity, it's that it will be used for the surveillance state without our consent. The unanswered question is where is this capacity going and what will it be used for REALLY. Ain't some training runs and chatGPT or the models wouldn't exist right now.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @11:10PM (3 children)
And it appeared rather lethal at first - 2% fatality rate among people who showed symptoms. That later went down around 1.2% fatality rate.
Why would they need that much computing for the surveillance state? We aren't generating that much data even if they monitor our every step.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @02:17PM (2 children)
Those initial fatality stats were from China. Diamond princess stats showed mostly 70+ people already one foot out the door were the chief victims. We put up with quite a few diseases that are more than 1-2%, although the final fatality I think ends up being something like. 0.88% when covid all said and done. It should have driven public policy but it didn't. We don't shut down everything for those others.
I also disagree that video, audio, internet traffic, associations and the analysis that has to be run on them and stored for the longer term doesn't generate that much data. You have the information itself and the predictive models trained for and used on it, running constantly. Both private and government efforts since they're getting hard to tell apart.
And let's say I was completely wrong, model hosting and training also doesn't take up the capacity they are building on it's own. Did you have some plausible alternative you were going to say?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Monday August 31, @06:26PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday September 01, @01:53AM
I'd start with model hosting and training actually. That can scale up. There's a lot of huge data bases out there in commerce. They'd be useful to a surveillance state, but they have independent business uses. On the model hosting/training thing, I see claims that it'll triple (I think from 2025 to 2030 span). That's a huge increase in demand for data centers right there.
My take is that people can only generate so much data. It's a lot, but we're looking at massive data storage. For example, storing all phone calls in the US per year is presently under 300 petabytes per year. This 2013 estimate [archive.org] guesses that total cost would be around $30 million plus $2 million per year in electricity costs. They cite another estimate that is quadruple that.
Suppose everyone had a mandatory body camera generating high definition video (with audio) of 1 GB/hour. That would be over 300 petabytes per hour for the entire US population. Crudely 10,000 times more data generated than for uncompressed phone conversations. So a year's storage (uncompressed) would be around $300 billion in assets plus $20 billion per year on electricity. That's using 2013 technology with 2013 prices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @11:59PM
It probably is.
Here in other parts of the world, we started seeing top down a sudden explosion of woke adoption in the corporate world from the very top almost within the span of a couple years - it seems to organized from a timeline perspective to almost signal that there was some sort of very covert organized approach to it than just random dogma adoption by the elites. Hard to prove though, but we've have many cases where we've caught foreign interference in various sectors including public.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Monday August 31, @02:33AM (4 children)
Promoting race problems has been a communist strategy for about a century. It became very obvious circa 1960.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @01:02PM (3 children)
Yeah, we were all getting along just great before then. I remember reading that blacks once enjoyed full lifelong employment back in the day.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @02:21PM (2 children)
That ended ~100 years before 1960. Only blacks have ever been oppressed on this planet and everything must be about them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @03:25PM
Top level AC here. Whoever you are, your buttons got pushed and now you're pushing other people's buttons.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @05:46PM
No it didn't. It just morphed into the American prison system. Read the 13th Amendment, Slavery 2.0
I don't care much about it, since whoever is in charge is going to act the same way. It's more of a class thing, the poor get beaten by the rich, color doesn't matter are much as social status, nobility and all that stuff.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedGreen on Sunday August 30, @11:42PM (4 children)
A parasite corporation controlled by a Nazi piece of shit whose entire reason for existence is to spread false information harming society. Is totally shocked to discover the Chinese version of their bot farm is trying to have a positive impact on society by spreading the truth about the AI industry and their harm to society. More news at 11.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday August 31, @06:52AM (3 children)
I think your hatred is perhaps blinding you. The Chinese aren't doing this as a favor to humanity to end the AI industry, they're doing this to win the AI race so everyone ends up using theirs - but in that scenario, pretty sure the rest of the world are second class citizens. The Chinese don't have a good human rights track record when they annexed other people.
Sure, the side-effect may be ending this "parasite corporation" you hate so much, but not for the reasons you mentioned and definitely not without other unintended repercussions.
(Score: 2, Touché) by tesdune on Monday August 31, @08:53AM (2 children)
Yeah, the record of the US is much better, eh?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @02:23PM
Ahchually, yea. I mean look at all the people trying to move to China and how welcoming they are about it.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday August 31, @10:46PM
I'm not American, from where I'm sitting in the world, relative to China, my opinion is "Yes".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @01:18AM (8 children)
From redstate dot com? Their headline: "Trump Called It..."
Is somebody trying to do satire here?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @06:02AM (7 children)
The quote was intentionally removed from the title that we have used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @01:07PM (6 children)
Well of course! Don't want to be too revealing, do we? Sorry, the story is bogus, should be obvious
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 31, @05:09PM (5 children)
You might not like what it says - but that doesn't make it bogus. Can you prove it is bogus?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @05:53PM (4 children)
It's not about what I like. It's propaganda from Musk/Trump. It's bogus because they have no real proof of anything they said. all hearsay from interested parties. You should be more suspicious of anything these people say. They are known liars, robbing our treasury and dismantling our government, selling off the pieces, and I am disappointed that you are defending them.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 31, @07:25PM (3 children)
I am not defending them. A community member submitted this story - direct your challenges to them. I will also await your own submissions. You have made 2 submission in 12 years, the most recent in 2019. You are about due another aren't you?
However, this is a discussion site. You made a claim. I am asking you to prove what you said. Saying it is 'propaganda' is easy. How do you know that there isn't a Chinese bot farm? You are implying that there isn't, but you cannot offer more than calling it propaganda.
One of the problems that I am now finding on this site is that some people, particularly Americans, are turning every discussion into an us verses them political argument. You have got the government that the American people voted for and unfortunately it doesn't appear to the the government that you want. I don't give a damn - it isn't my problem.
I know, I know, I've read your posts encouraging others to change the voting system but, until that happens, you are stuck with what you have. So please take your politics elsewhere.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @10:16PM (2 children)
? What does that even mean? I challenge the story, not the submitter. It seems, once again, you are taking it personally.
No, it's not my politics, I am contesting a very political accusation by people we know that have a reason to lie. The story is pure politics, without verifiable facts.
:-) Looks like you're trying to create a strawman. Need some help with that? I did no such thing. And besides, I don't care about propaganda bot farms (aside from the bandwidth and electricity they consume). That's an issue for idiot believers to deal with. They are the problem, not the bot farms.
Well, there ya go. You pegged the story perfectly. So I'm not sure what your beef is with me.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday August 31, @10:57PM (1 child)
Umm there are other sites covering the X stories with more examples of why they think it is a bot farm. Yes, identifying signal patterns are not verifiable facts. Maybe they're Chinese, maybe not.
I've stated in a post above already, China is taking the AI race seriously - they've done other things, which I won't repeat for the nth time, go and educate yourself on it, to undermine the U.S.'s lead in it, regardless of how much you hate Trump or Altman or the AI companies or think AI is just a fad. The superpower, specifically the big totalitarian one, don't think so.
btw, I'm not American, the AI race affects everyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @11:19PM
I never said there's no bot farm.
Exactly! That's what I'm getting at. This stuff is too easy to fake, and past history tells us who the best fakers are. Hint: It's not China. And they're not the real enemy either. I would say they are more the magician's assistant.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday September 01, @04:37PM
If you jump on Ali Express, a thousand bucks gets you a "phone farm" that lets you drive dozen of phones for click farming and astroturfing.
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mPBSBRl [aliexpress.com]
It has never been easier to create fake engagement.