Sen. Ted Cruz says China is fueling coordinated propaganda against U.S. data centers as America races for AI leadership that will decide whose values control the technology.
Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News Digital that the battle over artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it is being shaped by propaganda and influence campaigns while the United States competes with China for AI leadership.
The Texas Republican, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, warned that much of the new opposition to data centers is being manipulated by a well-funded and coordinated campaign. He said the goal is simple: convince Americans to slow their own infrastructure and lean on Chinese AI instead.
Cruz compared the effort to earlier foreign influence against U.S. energy production. He said the pattern is not new, and the stakes are not abstract.
"It's the same reason we saw Middle Eastern countries paying for anti-fracking movements," Cruz said. "Because if they can convince America, 'Don't develop your oil and gas, just buy it from us,' well, that's great for them and terrible for us. The same is true on data centers. If they can convince Americans, 'You don't want data centers here, you want to just rely on the Chinese for AI,' that's great for China, and it's terrible for America."
OpenAI announced in June that it had banned two clusters of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China. The company said the accounts were used in apparent covert influence operations that tried to manipulate debate over American AI and wider tech policies.
Those accounts caused social media comments and images claiming data centers are raising electricity costs for Americans. OpenAI described the activity as support for covert influence operations aimed at a legitimate public debate.
Cruz framed the episode as part of a broader contest over who creates the rules for the next generation of technology. He said the outcome will not be value-neutral.
"If China wins, AI will be focused on espionage and propaganda and control and surveillance, because that's the Chinese Communist Party. It will be their values. They will use AI to try to control you. If America wins, I want American values to be reflected in AI. I want free speech and individualism and free enterprise and privacy to be reflected in AI, not control and power."
That choice sits at the center of his warning. Data centers are the physical backbone of advanced AI. Slow them down at home, and someone else builds the stack.
Cruz also trained fire on domestic political pressure around AI safety and regulation. He said activists tied to effective altruism are hardcore leftists who want to use AI to push their ideology.
Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital last week that effective altruism is associated with what he called the "AI doomerism movement."
Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy, has become a major funder in that space. The organization says its AI work has expanded rapidly, with $168 million committed to AI safety, security, and field-building in 2024 and $351 million in 2025. It is on track to commit more than $1 billion to AI policy advocacy in 2026.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, are among the group’s main funders. Tuna serves as president. Moskovitz left Facebook in 2008. In 2015 the organization issued a call for founders to launch ambitious AI safety initiatives under Project Tailwind. A 2021 grant application description listed interests including effective altruism, global catastrophic risks, biosecurity, AI for epistemics, and forecasting.
Cruz cast another part of the fight as old-fashioned rent-seeking. He said giant AI companies are going to government asking for rules that entrench them and block competitors.
"Part of what we're seeing is a money grab, where there's an old concept in economics called rent seeking, which is big companies typically go to government and say, 'Give me a benefit, entrench me.' We’re seeing the giant AI companies going to government saying, 'Hey, why don't you put us in charge of government and let's set the rules so no one could compete with us.'"
He said Democrats’ position has aligned with big industry players, including Anthropic, that want exemption from antitrust laws and want to “get in bed with government” to control AI development.
Direct funding from the Chinese government into U.S. data center policy fights has not been revealed. Cruz’s point was about incentives and influence, not a completed paper trail of official Beijing checks.
In recent months, data centers and AI policy have been debated in Congress and around kitchen tables. Cruz chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, giving him a direct lane on the issue.
On May 8, 2025, that committee held a hearing on Capitol Hill with major tech witnesses, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su, CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator, and Microsoft President Brad Smith. Cruz spoke at the session as the policy fight intensified.
The Texas senator has kept a high profile across other national fights as well, from rejecting Supreme Court speculation to high-visibility public appearances tied to legislation.
Supporters of rapid U.S. buildout argue that electricity, chips, and server farms are the industrial base of the AI era. Critics warn about local power bills, land use, and safety risks. Cruz’s charge is that some of that opposition is being amplified and steered for strategic reasons, not only neighborhood concerns.
He has also been a regular presence in hard-edged political coverage, including episodes where crowds booed him on College GameDay while he promoted a college sports bill, a reminder that his profile stays loud even far from tech hearings.
Cruz’s core claim is not that AI is optional. It is that the winner of the race will load the technology with a governing philosophy. Chinese Communist Party priorities, in his telling, mean espionage, propaganda, control, and surveillance. American priorities, he argued, should mean free speech, individualism, free enterprise, and privacy.
That is why he treats data center resistance as more than a zoning dispute. If the United States talks itself out of building the plants that train and run large models, the vacuum does not stay empty. It gets filled by whoever is willing to build.
His fracking analogy was meant to make the incentive plain. Foreign producers once had reason to discourage U.S. energy development so buyers would stay dependent. He said the same logic now applies to compute: discourage American data centers, and dependence shifts overseas.
Political chatter around Cruz often swings to personnel drama, including rounds of Supreme Court trial balloons that keep his name in the headlines for reasons far from semiconductor supply chains. The AI fight is a different lane, and he is using the Commerce gavel and the interview circuit to keep it there.
Coefficient Giving’s projected jump past $1 billion in AI policy advocacy by 2026 shows how much money is already moving into the argument over rules, safety framing, and political pressure. Cruz calls a large share of that pressure ideological. Industry actors, he said, are happy to convert fear into protective regulation that locks in incumbents.
OpenAI’s ban on the China-linked ChatGPT clusters gave his warning a concrete recent example: automated accounts seeding claims about electricity costs and data centers inside a live American policy debate. The company said the activity backed apparent covert influence operations.
None of that settles every local fight over a substation or a water permit. It does frame why a Senate committee chair is treating AI infrastructure as a national power question, not a boutique tech story.
Cruz has spent years as a polarizing national figure, the kind of Republican who draws both fierce loyalty and noisy pushback, whether the subject is courts, campus politics, or college sports legislation. On AI, he is drawing a straight line from foreign influence and domestic ideology to the hardware footprint the United States either builds or surrenders.
America can build the data centers, create the rules around free speech and competition, and keep the stack aligned with constitutional habits. Or it can slow-walk the infrastructure, absorb the propaganda, and live inside someone else’s model of control. Cruz is telling voters the second path is a strategic gift to Beijing.
