The late, great historian David McCullough fondly compared the American story to The Little Engine That Could. It was a common theme across his historical treatment of American marvels ranging from infrastructures, like the Brooklyn Bridge, to innovators, like the Wright brothers. McCullough’s point, at once simple and profound, was that America’s builders were accustomed to overcoming odds, to chugging past difficulty with the conviction that they could.
It’s an important message to recall now as America’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions are being tested. And the test is more than just the simple physics of the task: America’s geopolitical rival, China, is propelling a subversive information campaign to sap Americans of their confidence and to derail US efforts at scaling the infrastructure necessary to compete for leadership in a new technological age.
America’s global leadership is no accident. It’s also not a given. Technological prowess – and the economic and security dividends it provides – have always been a necessary but insufficient condition for America’s international power. Equally important is belief in the narrative of that tech-enabled leadership. Technology is defined by disruptive cycles. Navigating, and maintaining a lead amid those, demands an at times illogical self-belief; thinking that we can.
America claimed an early lead at the algorithmic level of AI development. But that lead is near certain to evaporate without the infrastructure to scale and deliver real-world applications that lock in sustained AI leadership – and corresponding economic and security returns. Technological leadership in this era will hinge on data centers, hardware components, and energy. Those will make up the track for America’s AI engine to chug along. But technological leadership also requires the narrative belief and optimism that those can be delivered and applied in the United States – at a pace and scale that exceeds America’s chief competitor, China.
China understands this. It’s why Xi Jinping readily invokes the so-called Thucydides Trap. China wants to own the narrative. And Beijing wants that narrative to cloud American confidence while also bolstering China’s own technological fortunes – and, in turn, catalyzing the Chinese Communist Party’s global geopolitical ascendance as a new tech-enabled hegemon.
China’s threat is not theoretical. The country is well positioned rapidly to scale infrastructure and evade energy constraints that may befuddle America. Making that posture all the more dangerous is Beijing’s multi-front narrative push. China is actively backing misinformation campaigns against AI infrastructure development across the United States. Those campaigns are a nefarious wrinkle in China’s broader push to shape subnational opinion in American communities; recognizing these campaigns and their broader context should make the link between narrative, technological leadership, and China’s threat more real for all Americans.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute recently published an in-depth report on China-tied influence campaigns. That report documents narrative strands espoused and amplified by Chinese state-owned media as well as networks of high-net-worth Chinese nationals investing in content explicitly opposing US AI infrastructure development. These sophisticated campaigns aim to foment resistance to data centers in the United States and to diminish US political resolve for backing AI investments. They also directly shape policy proposals: The narratives championed by Chinese sources neatly align with and share overlapping China-tied funding from groups that shaped the introduction of the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. All the while, China’s preferred narratives magnify “the existential threat of AI” and downplay the national security implications of China’s own state-backed AI infrastructure buildup.
China is speaking up. Beijing does not want the United States thinking it can develop AI infrastructure. China’s narratives are shaping legislation considered in Congress and local resistance to infrastructure development. These tactics are newly documented and relatively novel in their application to AI infrastructure debates. But they follow a well-worn playbook. For example, in 2022 Chinese influence operations targeted US efforts to develop independent rare earth mining and refining capabilities in Texas. These campaigns exist as part of Beijing’s broader “United Front” work, which seeds Chinese influence across subnational and commercial ecosystems in the United States.
China doubts that Americans can see through the fog of this information war. Beijing wants to sow division and hesitation in the collective of American society. To overcome those Chinese-backed obstacles will require both tangible progress in technological infrastructure and a narrative that exudes confidence in America’s capacity to lead into a new era.
Can Americans see through China’s misinformation and embrace AI infrastructure development? And can enough be done for America to author an alternative before China’s preferred story becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I think we can. Let’s hope that the same rings true for American communities, tech leaders, financiers, and policy makers such that they can collaboratively lay the track for US AI leadership to chug along past Beijing’s skepticism.
– Nathan Picarsic, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and co-founder of Horizon Advisory
(Photo by Brett Sayles/Pexels)
