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GOP lawmakers, tech investors, and even OpenAI have tied the anti-data-center movement in the US to Chinese interference. Experts say it's much more complicated than that. Right-wing officials and data center investors are increasingly claiming that data center protests are being funded and influenced by the Chinese government. OpenAI added to the discourse on Wednesday when it released a report describing a cluster of accounts originating in China that, the company said, had been spreading anti-data-center messages on social media. Experts who spoke to WIRED, however, are skeptical of the funding claims.

China-based actors are likely behind the use of ChatGPT for "covert influence operations" aimed at stoking opposition to data centres in the United States, OpenAI has said. In a research report released on Wednesday, the company behind the world's most popular AI chatbot said it had banned a cluster of accounts likely based in China for attempting to "manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI". Among other content, the accounts generated a comic strip showing a cigar-chomping businessman holding bags marked with dollar signs as a family reacted in shock to their electricity bill, according to the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI said a second cluster of accounts had generated content casting US tariffs as an effort to "dominate technological competition" with China, and specified that the material should not mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While the campaign sought to "exploit and amplify existing public concerns" about energy prices, OpenAI found no evidence that it had a "meaningful" influence, the company said.

The Kremlin has "strongly" rejected an assessment by five European countries that the Russian state killed jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny by poisoning him. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's fiercest domestic opponent for years, died in an Arctic prison colony on February 16, 2024 while serving a 19-year sentence for "extremism", a charge he and his supporters said was punishment for his opposition work. "We naturally do not accept such accusations. We consider them biased and baseless," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a daily briefing call on Monday. "In fact, we strongly reject them," he added.

In response to a growing backlash, Microsoft said it would take steps to ensure that data centers don't raise utility bills in surrounding areas and address other public concerns. A Microsoft data center in Aldie, Virginia.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would be taking a series of steps toward becoming a "good neighbor" in communities where it is building data centers--including promising to ask public utilities to set higher electricity rates for data centers. Speaking onstage at an event in Great Falls, Virginia, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith directly referenced a growing national pushback to data centers, describing it as creating "a moment in time when we need to listen, and we need to address these concerns head-on." "When I visit communities around the country, people have questions--pointed questions. They even have concerns," Smith said, as a slide showed headlines from various news outlets about opposition to data centers.

The influential progressive third party announced Thursday that it was putting out a recruitment call for candidates specifically opposed to data centers. The Working Families Party said Thursday that it is putting out a specific recruitment call for people who are organizing against data centers in their communities to run for office. The announcement comes amid a period of heightened political turmoil around data centers, as some high-profile Democrats wade into the fight. Earlier this week, three Democrats in the Senate sent letters seeking information from Big Tech companies about how data centers impact electricity bills, while senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data center construction. "We see our role as responding to what working families and working people are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night," says Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party. "We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we were not responding to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities."

An image made with a drone shows air handling units on the roof of a CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia. An image made with a drone shows air handling units on the roof of a CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Mon 8 Dec 2025 07.00 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Dec 2025 08.41 EST A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and for exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year. The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI.

The UN Security Council is expected to vote on a draft resolution backing Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza. The text, submitted by the US, would give a mandate for the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and to set up transitional governance there. The US says multiple unnamed countries have offered to contribute to the ISF, though it is unclear whether it would be required to ensure Hamas disarms or function as a peacekeeping force. Its formation is a central plank of Trump's 20-point plan which last month brought a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in their two-year war. The draft also raises the possibility of a Palestinian state - something Israel strongly opposes.

Several large tech firms that are active in AI have set goals to hit net zero by 2030, but a new forecast of the energy and water required to run large data centres shows they're unlikely to meet those targets As the AI industry rapidly expands, questions about the environmental impact of data centres are coming to the forefront - and a new forecast warns the industry is unlikely to meet net zero targets by 2030. Fengqi You at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues modelled how much energy, water and carbon today's leading AI servers could use by 2030, taking into account different growth scenarios and possible data centre locations within the United States. They combined projected chip supply, server power usage and cooling efficiency with state-by-state electrical grid data to conduct their analysis. While not every AI company has set a net zero target, some larger tech firms that are active in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and Meta have set goals with a deadline of 2030. "The rapid growth of AI computing is basically reshaping everything," says You. "We're trying to understand how, as a sector grows, what's going to be the impact?"

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.