The Ben Shapiro Show - July 15, 2026


China and Russia Are Behind the War on AI Data Centers


Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

182.91

Word count

3,015

Sentence count

180

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

China and Russia want the United States to stop building artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in their neighborhoods. They want to stop Americans from getting power from American data centers, and they have a good idea how to do it: they want to destroy the U.S. data center industry.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Folks, here's a good rule for life.
00:00:01.000 If Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin want America to do something, we shouldn't do it.
00:00:06.000 Right now, there's one thing China and Russia would love to see more than anything else America fall way behind on AI.
00:00:11.000 We should stop building data centers.
00:00:12.000 They're all pushing for that.
00:00:14.000 And that should tell you something.
00:00:15.000 Today, we're going to separate some fact from fiction, including the claim that data centers are going to send your electric bill through the roof.
00:00:21.000 Spot the op, folks.
00:00:22.000 It's not that hard.
00:00:23.000 Let's get into it.
00:00:24.000 One of the things that's been happening in the United States is a very fraught battle over AI data centers.
00:00:29.000 Now, it seems totally unrelated, right?
00:00:31.000 And let's be real you can have lots of thoughts on AI.
00:00:34.000 You can talk about whether AI is a net positive or a net negative.
00:00:39.000 I'll say that I think that it's a net positive because it's one of the most sophisticated tools that will ever be developed for the betterment of the physical status of humans.
00:00:46.000 Now, again, that doesn't mean that your soul is going to get better because physical status and soul are not necessarily connected.
00:00:53.000 You have very poor people who can be filled with purpose, fulfillment and soul and very rich people who have none of those things.
00:01:00.000 But the goal of an economy is to enrich And when it comes to the private property system, the private property system is, in fact, very much connected to the idea that you have individual worth as a human being.
00:01:12.000 Socialism is rooted in the idea that you, as an individual human being, do not have any control over your own creative capacity as a human made in the image of God with the power to create and the power to control your destiny.
00:01:25.000 Socialism and communism are based on the opposite that all of those powers belong to the collective, they belong to the government.
00:01:31.000 Okay, but again, there are open questions that can be asked about AI or data centers in your neighborhood, but there is a reason why China and Russia.
00:01:39.000 Are trying to destroy the sort of data center movement in the United States. 0.72
00:01:45.000 They're trying to destroy the economy of the United States.
00:01:48.000 This is an overt op.
00:01:50.000 According to the New York Times, a state owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Virginia, writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence poses a threat to Americans' physical and financial well being.
00:02:03.000 A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet created by OpenAI's ChatGPT by people in China.
00:02:10.000 So hilariously, they're using AI.
00:02:12.000 In order to fight AI in the United States, because they want to win. 0.91
00:02:16.000 They understand, the Chinese understand, that if they control the mechanisms of distribution for AI, they can control your mind. 0.96
00:02:23.000 If all the information that you're getting is coming from a Chinese app, you will be brainwormed. 0.99
00:02:27.000 That is their goal. 0.95
00:02:29.000 If China is able to develop sophisticated military technology based on AI while preventing the United States from doing the same, they will gain real world power and spread their toxic ideology, harming legitimately billions of people in the process. 0.62
00:02:45.000 So, what are they trying to do?
00:02:46.000 They're trying to convince Americans that actually there is a large scale domestic movement worth its salt trying to stop the development of AI.
00:02:54.000 So, China started circulating these comics on X, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills, and it showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash.
00:03:03.000 As always, socialism is a foreign import to the United States.
00:03:05.000 Socialism in the United States is not a domestic development, it never was.
00:03:10.000 In some forms, it came from German progressivism, in some forms, it came from English Fabianism.
00:03:17.000 Originally, originally.
00:03:20.000 In some forms, it came from classical Marxist sources in Eastern Europe.
00:03:23.000 But the reality is that it has never found fertile soil in the United States.
00:03:27.000 And so you sort of have to convince people that it has an outgrowth in the United States. 0.52
00:03:31.000 And that's what China is doing.
00:03:33.000 Meanwhile, a video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company Firebird is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been the focus of Kremlin pressure.
00:03:45.000 The video's narrator says the country's electrical grid instability may render it useless.
00:03:50.000 All are examples of a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence, verging at times on hostility about the spread of data centers needed to power AI in the United States and elsewhere.
00:04:02.000 And you are seeing this work on the horseshoe. 0.96
00:04:04.000 You got Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who, of course, is fully in line with the Chinese on everything. 0.92
00:04:09.000 You got Stephen K. Bannon, who has been very warm toward Russia for a very long time. 0.83
00:04:17.000 They are following divisions in the United States, the Chinese and the Russians.
00:04:20.000 They're trying to exacerbate those divisions.
00:04:21.000 And it is working.
00:04:23.000 It is working. 0.55
00:04:24.000 Because if Russia and China can convince the United States to disarm itself in the war for the future, then toxic ideologies like communism or Russian tyranny become significantly more prominent.
00:04:35.000 Well, New York, naturally, is first off the line in going after AI.
00:04:42.000 According to CNBC, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday signed an executive order barring the construction of new large scale data centers using 50 megawatts or more of power for up to one year.
00:04:53.000 She said, We're in the midst of one of the most significant economic upheavals in generations, perhaps ever.
00:04:58.000 These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid's capacity.
00:05:04.000 They drive up costs for local ratepayers.
00:05:06.000 I refuse to let those costs get passed down to New Yorkers.
00:05:10.000 And data center moratoria remain popular in the state.
00:05:14.000 46% of respondents in New York believe that a one year moratorium on new permits for large data centers in New York would be good for the state.
00:05:20.000 Only 21% said it would be bad.
00:05:23.000 And that is a bipartisan proposition.
00:05:26.000 Well, again, that is because there is this idea that the collective is somehow being robbed by businesses.
00:05:31.000 That are actively innovating and generating tools for the use of individuals, which is what happens with technologies.
00:05:36.000 Technologies are innovations that bleed down to the level of individual use.
00:05:40.000 That is true for every single innovation.
00:05:42.000 You are the person using ChatGPT, you are the person who is using AI at a company level in order to increase efficiency and generate economic growth.
00:05:53.000 And this is an attempt to stop you from doing those things. 0.99
00:05:55.000 And then, hilariously, Hochul's press office put out an image of her with laser eyes surrounded by her dumb. 0.97
00:06:03.000 Advisors with a sign in front of her saying protecting New Yorkers, leading the nation. 0.97
00:06:07.000 By leading the nation, does she mean preventing technological innovation from happening in her state?
00:06:13.000 Again, there is a reason why foreign influence ops are fueling the anti data center movement.
00:06:17.000 And it is not because China and Russia have our interests at heart.
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00:07:30.000 According to the Washington Examiner, Chinese English language outlets like CGTN, China Daily, and Global Times have run aggressive campaigns against American data centers, blaming them for higher energy prices, environmental harm, and grid strain.
00:07:42.000 At the same time, those same outlets tout advancements in China's AI sector while conveniently downplaying or omitting Beijing's massive subsidies that cut energy costs for major data centers by up to 50%.
00:07:53.000 Meanwhile, the wildly anti American Singham Network, aligned with the CCP, is spreading its money everywhere.
00:08:01.000 That web of US based 501c3 nonprofit groups is primarily funded by Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai based American expatriate.
00:08:09.000 It includes, of course, Code Pink and groups like Tri Continental.
00:08:14.000 The messaging with Chinese state media, basically in alignment.
00:08:19.000 There are other foreign billionaires who are directing money into climate activism directed at sinking AI.
00:08:28.000 According to Manhattan Institute's City Journal, an estimated $130 billion in data center projects have now been blocked or delayed.
00:08:36.000 So, I mean, first of all, let's just point out that's a lot of jobs that people aren't going to get.
00:08:39.000 But second of all, it is, in fact, a foreign influence operation that is largely behind, not entirely.
00:08:46.000 Again, there's always going to be a Luddite strain of American politics, a populist progressive strain of American politics that says technological innovation is bad and we should all go back to the farms, neglecting the fact that, of course, our agricultural sector has become highly productive thanks to the use of modern technology.
00:09:03.000 With fewer employees, we generate more agricultural output than any time in American history by leaps and bounds, not close.
00:09:10.000 And as for the idea that somehow AI dentist centers are the reason for your high power bills, that's not true at all.
00:09:17.000 City Journal. has done a major breakdown on this.
00:09:20.000 And what they find is that the largest price increases on energy are concentrated on the West Coast and in the Northeast, where state policies have made electricity more expensive to produce and deliver.
00:09:30.000 Renewable mandates require utilities to procure growing shares of wind and solar.
00:09:34.000 Net metering programs shift grid costs from rooftop solar owners onto other customers.
00:09:39.000 The sharpest increases in energy prices are found in the states with aggressive climate policies, not the ones with the big data centers.
00:09:46.000 In Virginia, where data centers consume more than a fifth of the state's electricity, They've experienced price increases near the national average.
00:09:53.000 If anything, actually, data centers, says the Manhattan Institute, have placed modest downward pressure on retail rates.
00:10:00.000 Large new loads often lower rates for everyone by spreading the electrical grid's enormous fixed costs across a broader customer base.
00:10:07.000 So, again, in many cases, what's happening is that these data centers are coming in and seeking to help the building of new electrical grid, of new power, in order to facilitate their cost reduction.
00:10:24.000 A new working paper by one Asa Watton and Jeffrey Blanchard of the Electric Power Research Institute finds that data centers pushed residential rates modestly down between 2015 and 2024.
00:10:38.000 Again, not a shock because it turns out that additional supply of power, which is what you are going to build, is going to reduce the price.
00:10:46.000 And all of that reduces inflation.
00:10:49.000 So, in good economic news, inflation had its biggest drop since 2020 in June.
00:10:55.000 Part of that is the sudden drop in oil prices because of President Trump's MOU.
00:11:00.000 But some of it is also because of increasing productivity due to AI and those developments.
00:11:10.000 It's the largest one month decrease since April 2020.
00:11:14.000 Kevin Walsh, who is going to be the new head of the Federal Reserve, was testifying in Congress.
00:11:22.000 And he says, listen, I don't want Americans to have to think about inflation.
00:11:27.000 This committee had long committed to a 2% inflation target.
00:11:33.000 That is our resolution.
00:11:34.000 That's what I'm here to say and double down on.
00:11:38.000 But as we discuss privately, I'll say publicly my broader definition of price stability is a change in prices such that households and businesses don't have to worry about it, don't have to think about it.
00:11:52.000 Now, Warsh is an excellent pick, by the way, for the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
00:11:57.000 He suggested that AI would be disruptive, but it's going to create a lot of jobs, which, of course, is true.
00:12:05.000 My own best guess is that the advent of the technology will be augmenting existing work, that employees that were there will be more productive.
00:12:15.000 And ultimately, at the end of the day, I don't believe in the lump of labor fallacy.
00:12:20.000 All the jobs that are there have already been created, and the technology will remove some.
00:12:25.000 Well, it might be disruptive in the near term, but it'll create a lot of other jobs.
00:12:29.000 Just to give one example from history, and then I'll close: who knew at the creation of the internet that the internet would create a million and a half Uber and Lyft drivers?
00:12:39.000 I certainly didn't.
00:12:40.000 So I want to be very open minded about the job producing elements of it.
00:12:46.000 Now, what Warsh points out is that AI investment soon is just going to be called investment.
00:12:50.000 By the way, whenever you do a poll and you say, should there be new data centers built, people are like, okay.
00:12:54.000 And then if you add AI to the beginning of it, people freak out because people have been scared about AI in ways that I think are wildly disproportionate to the actual threat of AI.
00:13:02.000 And again, there are questions to be asked about AI.
00:13:05.000 We'll get to those in a second.
00:13:06.000 But here's Warsh.
00:13:09.000 At the Fed, we don't yet know fully the extent to which the economy will benefit from AI.
00:13:14.000 Yet it seems inevitable that which we're now calling AI investment will soon just be called investment.
00:13:23.000 That, of course, is right.
00:13:24.000 And the bottom line, again, is this when it comes to AI or economic development or any of the rest of this stuff, if you're on the side of China and Russia, you are doing it wrong.
00:13:33.000 Anthropic co founder Daniela Amodi notes that we do have foreign competitors in this space, and that if we just decide to abandon the race in AI, we are going to lose.
00:13:44.000 Any one company can choose to say, we're not going to barrel ahead.
00:13:48.000 We're going to stop exactly right where we are, not do anything else. 0.93
00:13:52.000 And the challenge is there are competitors, and there are also, by the way, other nations that have a desire to catch up to the strength of the models that Anthropic is producing today.
00:14:04.000 And so I think the approach we have taken is to say, there absolutely might be cases where more globally, more worldwide, we might want to slow things down.
00:14:16.000 And in The interim, we need to be the best, most powerful actor in terms of thinking about safety, right?
00:14:23.000 We need to say, hey, how do we actually build and design and develop safety tools and systems such that that becomes a requirement?
00:14:33.000 Now, again, there are open questions about AI in the same way there's open questions about Google search or questions about Wikipedia, many questions about Wikipedia.
00:14:41.000 When it comes to the informational environment, it can obviously be biased.
00:14:44.000 There's a story from Fox News today pointing out, based on research from the Media Research Center, That there was a large scale blackout in coverage over Graham Platner's Nazi tattoo and Reddit posts.
00:14:57.000 And that that blackout in coverage began after a poll released in late October suggested that Platner was the most formidable Democrat to unseat Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.
00:15:07.000 The blackout ended following the New York Times' May 30th report about Platner's sexting controversy.
00:15:11.000 Apparently, Apple News and Google News failed to promote at least 112 news stories pushed by conservative leaning outlets that scrutinized Platner during that November through May period.
00:15:21.000 MRC President David Bazell points out that the tech platforms were running what he called a protection racket for Graham Plattner.
00:15:29.000 Meanwhile, a Washington Post analysis showed that most chatbots share left leaning positions.
00:15:35.000 OpenAI, meaning ChatGPT, uses left leaning arguments.
00:15:38.000 DeepSeq uses left leaning arguments 70% of the time.
00:15:42.000 Gab uses it 50%.
00:15:45.000 Anthropic, believe it or not, is at least both sides 57% of the time, but at no time is their right wing argument presented. 0.56
00:15:52.000 Grok is the most even.
00:15:54.000 Not a shock there.
00:15:54.000 That's Elon's AI, XAI.
00:15:59.000 40% left leaning arguments, 27% both sides, 33% right leaning arguments.
00:16:04.000 Google Gemini is presenting both sides 93% of the time.
00:16:08.000 Okay, but obviously there can be bias in this.
00:16:10.000 Here's what I promise you I promise you that if China or Russia controls the AI, the answer will be 100% of the time what China and Russia want it to say.
00:16:19.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:16:21.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:16:22.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.