X exposes Chinese bot farm manipulating debate on US data centers, energy policy

The Global Government Affairs arm for X said in a post, "The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations: We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy."

"These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense. We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy," the post added.

The report from X, which has gone viral, cites various posts from the "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts" that have churned out exaggerated claims about the impact data centers have on communities. One of the claims has been that data centers are drastically increasing energy bills across the United States.

However, that has been overstated, according to a report from RealClearEnergy, which stated, "At the local grid level, data-center entry raises nearby congestion costs by approximately $1.45–$2.30/MWh. At the regional wholesale level, prices in an affected zone rise by roughly $3.44/MWh in the year following the entry of a new data center. This is a predictable result of higher-cost generation being dispatched to meet new demand."

"The retail impact, however, is even smaller. Doubling a utility's operating data-center capacity is associated with only a 0.65% increase in residential electricity prices, which translates to approximately $0.001/kWh. For the typical household, that is less than one dollar per month," the report adds.

Water has also been a point of concern with data centers online. However, golf courses in the US use three times the amount of water that all data centers use in the US each day, according to data from the Heritage Foundation. Data centers use around 449 million gallons a day, but California almond farms use 4.2 billion gallons.

The report from X comes as there has been nationwide pushback against data centers, with many politicians taking action to crack down on their construction or even calling for moratoriums on data centers.