Data Center Critics Love To Cite This Study. Its Authors Have Ties To China.

As concerns about AI and the data centers that power it intensify, journalists have reached for evidence to prove that increasingly unpopular data centers are not as profitable as supporters claim. They found it in an academic paper coauthored by a graduate of a university with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, the United States’ main competitor in the artificial intelligence race.

“[G]otta call balls & strikes and this paper on data centers isn’t one of the encouraging ones: ‘Capital without Labor: Data Centers and the Local Economy,’” New York Times reporter Talmon Joseph Smith wrote on X. CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla then highlighted the paper, which concluded there was “limited evidence that data center development improves fiscal balances, employment, or business formation.”

One of the paper’s coauthors, Qiang Wang, is a graduate of Zhejiang University, which has defense labs tied to Chinese intelligence and where students are, according to one expert, offered “classes on writing intelligence reports, alongside classes like how to attack and defend AI systems.”

Wang claims she did not see this side of Zhejiang University.

“My time at Zhejiang University did not shape my opinion on artificial intelligence,” Wang told The Daily Wire, adding that she majored in “Food Science” at the university and did not take any courses on artificial intelligence.

One of her coauthors, Liu Ee Chia, is an associate professor of real estate at the National University of Singapore. Reached for comment about Wang’s academic affiliations, she told The Daily Wire that any suggestion Wang was influenced by the CCP was “a serious allegation with no evidence behind it.”

In fact, the control Beijing exerts on Chinese universities and their students and faculty is a well-documented national security threat.

Under Xi Jinping, Chinese universities have updated their charters to emphasize loyalty to the Communist Party. In 2018, Fudan University added a new charter clause that said, “The university Communist Party committee is the core leadership of the school.” Since Xi took office in 2013, over 100 universities revealed new charters that affirmed party leadership.

“In China everything bends the will or serves the Chinese Communist Party,” Brent Sadler, a retired Navy captain and former Pentagon China Branch chief, told The Daily Wire. “This needs to be remembered, and definitely includes their universities as well as their engagement and investments in our universities here in the United States of America.”

“There is always an angle from Beijing,” Sadler added.

Just one month before Wang’s paper was published, the Department of War directed Penn State — from which Chia earned her PhD — to audit its collaborations with foreign entities of concern, most of them Chinese.

“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” said Emil Michael, undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering. Penn State has faced scrutiny for hosting a chapter of the CCP-backed Confucius Institute, which the State Department has designated “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms.”

Wang and Chia’s other coauthors, Jess Cornaggia and David Haushalter, currently work at Penn State. Cornaggia coauthored a 2015 study with Xuan Tian, now affiliated with Peking University, which found competition hurts innovation in the banking industry.

Whether or not Wang was influenced by her CCP ties, the conclusions of her paper are hardly foregone. The average resident of Loudoun County, Virginia, saves an average $5,800 per year in property taxes thanks to the $1.3 billion generated by one of its data centers.

Richland Parish, Louisiana, was able to give its teachers a $50,000 bonus from tax revenue generated by a Meta data center expansion.

“With bonuses like that, the best educators come to you,” Richland Parish School District Superintendent Sheldon Jones told The Daily Wire. “If we can attract the best teachers, we could become one of the best school districts in our region.”

Wang’s paper largely focuses on the impact data centers have on water prices. Critics say the amount of water these centers consume in the cooling process is bad for the environment and costly for residents. Wang’s paper estimates that data centers could cost local economies about $2.30 extra every year per $1,000 borrowed between school bonds and water bonds. She argues that for water-scarce counties, that figure could jump to $6 per $1,000 borrowed.

But supporters of data centers say concerns about water consumption are exaggerated.

“Nothing against golfers out there, but golf courses use 40 times more water than data centers,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that “38,000 ChatGPT queries” use “the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in California.”

As Americans grow increasingly wary of data centers and AI, Republicans have warned that any pause on developing the technology would only serve to empower Beijing. David Sacks, who served as Trump’s AI Czar, said that halting AI development would “play into China’s hands,” and that Beijing “would love for us to stop AI development.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned last week that if AI critics like Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) had their way, we would be forced to “shut it all down and allow China to overlap us and become the great superpower on the planet.”

“There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers,” President Donald Trump said earlier this week. “The only one that is happy about it is China.”

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