Peter Diamandis put a slide on the screen and read from it. The post, from X's global affairs team, said the company's safety team had investigated "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations" and identified "a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts." Then came the number that did the work in the discussion on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis: within that farm, the statement said, X found "200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy."
The distinction matters for reading the story. The 200,000 figure is the suspected network overall. The 200 is the slice of it that, according to X, was posting on this particular subject. Those posts, the statement said, carried claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others were AI-generated cartoons showing data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense; Peter displayed one of them on the show.
The disclosure reached the panel through a report by Brian Wang reproducing X's statement. The dates attached to the two do not line up: the report carries a publication date of 27 August 2026, and the post it reproduces is dated 28 August.
"Standard psyops" and no easy defense
Data centers are the warehouses of computers that train and run AI systems. They need a great deal of electricity, and where they are built is decided locally, county by county — which is why a debate about national AI policy keeps turning into a fight at a zoning meeting.
Peter announced himself sarcastically "shocked" that a foreign influence operation would try to slow American data-center deployment, then turned the question to his co-hosts, Salim Ismail and Dave Blundin. The reply was that this is standard psychological operations, the kind of thing you would expect to see, and that the hard part is that there is no easy defense against it. The deeper vulnerability, the speaker argued, is that people in the United States are "very, very narrative-driven rather than evidence-driven."
That framing came with a caveat from the panel itself: "I don't know what the U.S. is doing in China." The complaint was about the scale of the numbers, not a claim that only one side runs such operations.
On an earlier episode, the same panel had discussed foreign interference in the data-center fight only as a suspicion — a worry that in a year or two, some share of the opposition would turn out to have been encouraged from abroad. X's statement gives that worry a specific reported network. It does not say the posts changed anyone's mind. Peter, for his part, returned to a figure the program has quoted before: a roughly 75% not-in-my-backyard sentiment, in which people would sooner have a nuclear power plant next door than a data center. That, he said, seemed completely illogical.
The town that says it worked
Against the cartoons, Peter put a second story, one he said CNN had reported: Quincy, Washington, where the data centers have had what he called extraordinary positive civic impact. The poverty rate there fell from 29.4% to 6.2%. Tax revenue from the tech facilities funded a new high school, a hospital, a library, and police and fire stations, while residents' property tax rates went down.
"This is a story about the tech industry succeeding," Peter said. "And bluntly, this is the story that the tech industry needs to be telling and needs to be making happen."
The making-it-happen part got specific. If you or someone you know is against data centers, one panelist said, dig into the numbers first — water, in his view, is not the issue. Then he described what he considered the right policy, which puts the demand on the county rather than on the resident: you can build here, but generate your own power, or subsidize community power so that local electricity gets cheaper. And to the hyperscalers — the largest cloud and AI operators — invest in the schools, the libraries, the community. "Take a fraction of the cost and make everybody's life there better. That's the right way to do it."
It is a proposal, not a rule anywhere. What Quincy shows, on the panel's account, is tax revenue arriving and being spent; the bargain being described would make cheaper local electricity a condition of building in the first place.
The digital divide, upside down
The mention of libraries prompted a longer thought from the panel. Not long ago the worry was the digital divide: that some regions would be left behind with less computing power. Now, whether because of influence operations or ordinary politics, the panel saw the exact opposite — regions that could in principle be lifted economically, energetically and computationally instead wringing their hands that they might suffer from too much compute. "How much the tide has turned," one said.
What nobody on the show claimed to know was the intent behind the accounts. This, one of the co-hosts said, is one of those stories where you absolutely need the truth, and he reached for the pandemic as his example of what happens when you do not get it: a medical question about masks and ivermectin that turned into a Republican opinion and a Democrat opinion, and ended with Fauci on trial. "Like, come on, man, this is bullshit. We need the absolute truth."
Applied here, the open question he posed was whether it is Chinese Communist Party policy to disrupt American opinion on data centers, slow the buildout and win the race to recursive self-improvement — the point at which AI systems improve themselves — or whether, as he said Alvin Graylin argues, Beijing does not think vaguely in those terms at all and is simply trying to improve life at home, with no interest in seeding false stories in the United States. "Which is the true story. I don't actually know."
Peter's answer was about the buildings rather than the intent: data centers are not the enemy, they are an economic engine that can revive a community that has been left behind. The panel agreed, and one co-host added a prediction about what he expects next if the current line of attack fails: another story, perhaps that AI is corrupting your children, and then another after that — hypothetically, he said, some infinitely scrollable video app that becomes addictive to kids. The reply came back that American companies are already doing a great job of that themselves.