More Foreign Funding For Data Center Oppo Revealed
I missed this story from the Washington Free Beacon while doing my 5 Big Stories research this morning:
Foreign billionaires and nonprofits have funneled tens of millions of dollars to the activist groups fueling data center opposition across the United States, records show. Chief among them is Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has contributed nearly $14 million to four left-wing groups that signed a letter calling for a U.S. data center moratorium.
Those groups are the Indivisible Project, Americans for Financial Reform, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace USA, to which Wyss has contributed $7,455,000, $4,382,000, $2,107,400, and $50,000 as of March 2026, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and highlighted in a new report from the American Energy Institute. Another foreign billionaire, British hedge fund manager and climate activist Chris Hohn, has contributed $200,000 to Extinction Rebellion, which signed the same December 2025 letter calling on Congress to “support a national moratorium on the approval and construction of new data centers.”
Five other signees—environmental groups 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), the John Muir Project, New York Communities for Change, and Oil Change International—have taken sizable contributions from foreign sources.
They include the U.K.-based Oak Foundation, which has contributed $7.5 million to 350.org, $6,375,000 to GAIA, $550,000 to New York Communities for Change, and $4,000,000 to Oil Change International; and the Danish nonprofit KR Foundation, which has contributed nearly $1.1 million to 350.org, nearly $500,000 to Friends of the Earth, and nearly $1.9 million to Oil Change International. Another British organization, the Quadrature Climate Foundation, has contributed nearly $1 million to 350.org and $2.2 million to the John Muir Project.
Together, the three organizations—along with Wyss and Hohn—have contributed nearly $40 million to the letter’s signatories. Wyss accounts for more than a third of that funding. A spokeswoman for his foundation distanced Wyss from the letter, saying that the Wyss Foundation “was not involved” and that its grants to groups behind the letter were “unrelated.”
The revelation comes as opposition to data centers grows in the United States—and as U.S. policymakers take notice of the movement’s ties to foreign entities.
Opposition efforts blocked or delayed data center projects making up $152 billion in potential investment in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, a boutique research firm that tracks such efforts.
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There is much more in this paywall-free story.
That is all.
The Wyss denial is the whole story in miniature. "Not involved." "Unrelated." And the maddening part is, he might even be technically right, because our system is designed so that no one can ever say otherwise. The $14 million is documented. What it was FOR is deniable by default.
That's the game. Disclosure rules capture the dollar, but never the purpose. The Form 990 shows the money moved while hiding who gave it and why. So a foreign donor can fund the groups driving a national data-center moratorium and, when asked, simply say the grants were "unrelated." There's no record that can contradict him, because we never built one.
Documented money, deniable intent. That gap isn't an accident in the system; it IS the system. And it's precisely the cover that makes this kind of foreign influence so easy and so safe to run.
This will continue, it is getting bigger, and our government moves so slowly to fix these obvious loopholes that allow A LOT of foreign influence in the U.S. The point here is that the laws that allow this were not written by accident.
So foreign actors are giving serious money to domestic groups so they can protest the construction of domestic data centers. Sounds a LOT like foreign actors want to slow U.S. progress in AI, and they are using useful idiots to do it. Methinks we should be building MORE data centers, not fewer.