The Anti-Data-Center Argument Everyone's Making Turns Out to Be China's

Central Virginia has neighbors close to blows in the street over new data centers. Craig's number for the other side of the ledger: one community found that without the tax revenue a data center brings in, property taxes on every home would rise $5,800 a year. Add $250,000-a-year electrician jobs, emissions cut more than 90% once a site is required to generate its own power, and a mandated 20% energy surplus handed back to the grid, and the case against building locally gets a lot thinner than the protest signs suggest.

Then the turn: Jeff points out that a lot of the people fighting these projects are, point for point, reciting Chinese Communist Party talking points without knowing it — sourced, Craig says, from a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, "The Data Center Panic and the U.S. Decline." The mechanism behind it: China is pricing equivalent AI processing at roughly half of what U.S. companies charge, betting that price-sensitive American users and companies will send their data there anyway. Fewer U.S. data centers means more of that traffic — and the underlying economic edge — goes to China by default.

Craig also walks a live attack from the day before: a client's phone lit up twice with an MFA prompt asking if he was logging into the company VPN. He said no both times. Tracing the request's network block back past a New York data center landed in Hong Kong. By the time an attacker reaches the multi-factor step, Craig notes, they already have the VPN address, the login email, and the password — the app-based prompt is the last line standing. He ran the client's email through haveibeenpwned.com (free, no account needed) and found the credentials already circulating on the dark web.

Also in this segment:

• An American Medical Association article claiming AI now outperforms doctors with a doctor's involvement even more than AI alone — which Jeff meets with an immediate, cheerful refusal to give up his own physician, "Dr. Bob," over "Dr. Robbie D. Robot"
• Two live Massachusetts breaches: UMass Amherst hit with fraudulent dead-credit-card charges, and a Marlboro-area robotics manufacturer — supplying military and medical clients — unable to ship product for two weeks after being hacked
• A reminder that elementary schools are targeted for students' Social Security numbers specifically because a stolen child's number can go unnoticed and unused for years

Free newsletter: CraigPeterson.com