That Americans do not want AI data centers near their homes is by now hard to dispute: 71 percent oppose the construction of a data center in their own area, according to Gallup, with nearly half firmly opposed.
A familiar Nimby story, with a twist. This is a classic Nimby dynamic, and not one confined to the United States — Italy is living through a version of it too.
- What has been added in recent weeks is a second, thornier layer: the accusation, made by Republican lawmakers and parts of Silicon Valley, that behind this genuine popular anger also lies a foreign amplification effort — including the alleged payment of local activists — with Beijing as the prime suspect, accused of using local grievances as leverage for its own global interests.
Beijing as suspect. A report from the digital risk management firm Alethea documents roughly 700 mentions of data centers by Chinese, Russian and Iranian state media between January and June, described as an attempt to turn the domestic revolt against data centers into a “wedge against trust in U.S. infrastructure, companies and government.”
- On the political front, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie led a letter calling on the Trump administration to investigate these alleged campaigns, claiming to have “strong evidence.”
Not just an American problem. The phenomenon, in any case, is not an American exclusive. Italy, too — where planned investment in this critical infrastructure has recently been put at €25 billion — is seeing similar dynamics.
- In Lombardy, which hosts roughly half of Italy’s data centers and accounts for more than 60 percent of the country’s more than 500 connection requests filed with grid operator Terna, a map of social opposition is emerging that closely mirrors the American one:
- in Lacchiarella, south of Milan, a couple of hundred people gathered on July 11th against the Apto Campus project, in an area — spanning Lacchiarella, Zibido San Giacomo, Opera and Siziano — where at least five projects overlap at different stages of approval;
- in Travagliato, in the province of Brescia, a town council session on the issue drew more than 300 people in person and roughly 800 online.
- Italy still lacks both a national organized network comparable to historic movements such as No Tav, and any accusation of foreign orchestration: the protests remain, on the surface, the expression of local committees — though what lies beneath that surface is not entirely clear.
Why the fracture is exploitable. The interesting question, then, is not whether interference exists — it is plausible, and partly documented — but why it works. An influence operation does not conjure a hostile public opinion out of nothing; it finds one already there, and rides it.
- An NBC News poll from March put net favorability toward AI at minus 20 points — worse than the Republican Party, worse than ICE, third from the bottom in a ranking that also includes the Iranian government.
- Opposition to data centers is almost identically bipartisan: 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans say they would oppose a facility in their own area.
- The reasons follow the classic Nimby playbook — health and safety, pollution, quality of life, landscape concerns, property values — layered with the conspiratorial readings that never fail to appear, and with the doubts, insecurities and misunderstandings that surround artificial intelligence itself.
This is exactly the kind of fracture — cross-partisan, emotional, anchored in material fears over electricity bills and jobs rather than in coherent ideological positions — that a foreign influence operation can exploit far more effectively than an issue already polarized along predictable party lines.
- It does not need to manufacture consensus. It only needs to find the widest crack and pry it open.
Sanders and the populist amplifier. It is within this pattern that Bernie Sanders’s recent letter — the veteran left-wing senator wrote to the leaders of the AI industry demanding a halt to the technology’s development — risks becoming a further point of leverage.
- Sanders has built his campaign on an explicitly populist register: Big Tech threatens jobs, public health and democratic control, and must be stopped before it is too late.
- The risk, for now more logical than factual, is what the sequence suggests: if an influence operation seeks out the widest crack in public opinion, and if a populist register built for electoral success works precisely to widen — by legitimizing on a national scale — an anxiety that would otherwise remain scattered across local protests, then the pursuit of domestic consent and the external exploitation of that same anxiety risk moving, with no coordination whatsoever and without the former knowing or intending it, in the same direction.
Zuckerberg’s counter-move. If Sanders unwittingly feeds the fracture by giving it political voice, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to close it from the opposite direction — not with the argument of safety, but with that of infrastructure.
- The $1 billion fund for communities hosting Meta’s data centers, announced the same day as Sanders’s letter, is an explicit attempt to defuse the most material component of local anger — electricity bills, jobs, economic spillovers — before it finds further political outlets or surfaces for external amplification.
The bottom line: It is a response that engages with neither Sanders’s existential framing nor the China-interference narrative: it sidesteps both, seeking instead to make opposition materially less worthwhile, community by community.
- Whether it works is far from certain — buying local consent campus by campus is a slow, complex undertaking, one further burdened by the pre-existing social hostility that a Big Tech company inevitably carries with it, while the national political fracture is widening faster still.
- Even so, it is telling proof of how much this contest is now being fought less over federal policy and more over the resilience of the social fabric that underpins it — the same fabric Beijing, reportedly, is already watching with considerable interest.
