X dismantles a Chinese bot farm of 200,000 accounts: the battle for AI data centers is also fought online

Two hundred accounts out of two hundred thousand. That’s the number to keep in mind from the announcement made by X this week. Elon Musk's network claims to have spotted and then swept away a bot farm from China, an army of fake profiles, of which a tiny minority had set out to stoke American resentment against data centers. The ground was already hot. Rising electricity bills, local residents organizing, an anti-AI data center revolt blocking tens of billions of dollars in projects. And now, Beijing lurking behind the signs. The narrative is enticing. It especially deserves a thorough reading of the numbers. Key points of this article:

• Elon Musk announced that X detected a Chinese bot farm of 200,000 accounts, but only 200 were active in manipulating the debate on data centers.
• OpenAI had already reported a similar operation called "Data Center Bandwagon," claiming that anger against data centers and rising electricity bills did not need Beijing's help to intensify.

The announcement comes from X's Global Government Affairs account, relayed by Engadget on August 28. "We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a way likely to manipulate a legitimate debate," the platform wrote. The debate in question is about the cost of electricity for households, which these profiles attributed to data centers.

Two hundred accounts. On a network that has several hundred million. A drop in an ocean of ordinary bad faith, except that the drop made a lot of noise. These profiles spread AI-generated comics where data center operators pocket the profits while ordinary families pay the bill, with accusations of local networks being overwhelmed as a bonus. "We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate public interest topics," concludes X, in the unprecedented role of guardian of healthy debate.

But the story doesn’t start at the end of August. On June 10, OpenAI published its threat report and described an operation called "Data Center Bandwagon," conducted by a group of ChatGPT accounts presumably operated from China. According to the company, the authors were likely working for a private tech company whose clients are provincial administrations, and were using VPNs to bypass the ban on accessing ChatGPT from the country.

The modus operandi? Comments in English claiming that data centers were exploding demand and electricity prices, AI-generated comics on network capacity auctions (those bids where network managers buy available power in advance), retouched images, all signed by fake Americans under the hashtags #capacityauction and #datacenters. The same cell was also harassing expatriate Chinese dissidents, including activist Li Ying. Hard to get more classic in the genre.

The sticking point, for conspiracy enthusiasts, lies in a sentence from Ben Nimmo, lead investigator at OpenAI: "This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate." The debate existed. The bots jumped on the bandwagon, hence the name of the operation, and their reach remained minimal, confined to a single platform and an almost nonexistent audience.

Because Americans did not wait for China to complain. In Texas, data center operators have seen local elected officials turn against them, to the point that a report from Journal du Coin titled on actors who "dug their own grave." In several rural counties, farmland is being negotiated up to 17 times its market price to host servers, and it is the neighbors who pay the bill in network strain.

Nevertheless, a microscopic influence operation gives an unexpected gift to gigawatt promoters. Every mayor who refuses a permit becomes suspect, every local residents' association a potential relay. And X, whose bot moderation has long resembled a sieve, finds itself handing out certificates of patriotism. Irony of the times.

The real showdown is happening elsewhere. On megawatts, not mentions. AI giants are so short on electricity that they are eyeing the gigawatts of Bitcoin miners, and the latter have learned the lesson. IREN delivered its first data center to Microsoft on August 17, 50 megawatts in Childress, Texas, as part of a $9.7 billion contract, proof that the former computing power of mining is recycling faster than the arguments of bot farms.

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