Nvidia Weighs $250 Billion Backstop For OpenAI’s Gargantuan Ohio Data Center Campus
Nvidia is in early talks to provide up to $250 billion in financing guarantees to help OpenAI lease computing capacity from a planned $500 billion, 10-gigawatt data center facility in Ohio, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The proposed deal highlights investor concerns that the AI bubble has been fueled by circular financing.
The SoftBank-led project is located in southern Ohio and, when fully built, would support 10 gigawatts of computing capacity, or roughly equivalent to the output of 10 large nuclear reactors. The first 800-megawatt phase is targeted for 2028. This would rank the facility among the world’s largest AI infrastructure hubs.
The potential backstop would help SoftBank secure financing while supporting future demand for Nvidia’s chips, further highlighting the circular nature of the AI boom. Sources said Nvidia-OpenAI negotiations are still ongoing and could change at any time.
“While Nvidia’s investments and partnerships reinforce confidence in long-term AI buildouts, investors remain concerned about circular financing,” said Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, as quoted by the media outlet.
Last week we noted …
The problem with the $2 trillion in circular AI financing is that it is all contingent on the frontiers (Anthropic/ OpenAI) being money good on their $1.5+TN in unfunded commitments. Which they won’t be if Chinese open LLMs grab market share
The Bank for International Settlements warned last month (read report) that a “disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions.” It added that a “major equity-market correction could have larger macroeconomic consequences today than in the past.”
Against that backdrop, traders will be laser-focused on this week’s Big Tech earnings for signals regarding the trajectory of AI capital spending and, more importantly, whether those investments are beginning to generate adequate returns (read report). Given the high concentration of AI stocks powering major equity indexes higher, the results could determine the market’s next big move.
Ed Dowd, writing on the Beyond the Narrative Substack, previously warned that the AI-capex rocket fuel propelling markets may be starting to fade. He identified four factors behind the potential inflection point. Read more here.
Chamath Warns A Government Ban On Open-Source AI Would Tank The Market And Crater Anthropic And OpenAI
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya warned that any U.S. move to ban open-source AI would blow a hole in corporate balance sheets and drag the stock market down.
“If the United States government intervenes, it will tank the stock market. Not debatable,” Palihapitiya said on the “All-In” podcast released over the weekend. “Now, you can debate which companies get tanked. For example, if they said, ‘No more open source. American companies cannot use open source.'”
Chamath: Banning Open Source AI Will Crash the Stock Market. @chamath: “If the United States government intervenes, it will tank the stock market. Not debatable. Now, you can debate which companies get tanked…”
“Okay, let’s take an average normal company, Coca-Cola,” Palihapitiya continued. “‘Hey, Coca-Cola, you’re trying to use AI to improve your business. You know what? You can only use these two options. And those things cost 50-100x more than your other best alternative that you may use otherwise.'”
“That will eventually show up in your costs. And so this incredibly important input into your cost model is now orders of magnitude, multiples greater than your competitors that are outside the United States, simply because you’re in the United States,” he added. “You’re forced to absorb costs that aren’t rational nor market-driven. So then Coca-Cola has to get re-rated.”
Palihapitiya then turned on the labs themselves, arguing that their revenue depends on government-erected barriers rather than real market demand.
“But then you look at the people who are selling those tokens, and this is where Anthropic and OpenAI need to understand, if the government comes in and actually tells you that there’s no open source, their valuation will crater,” he said.
“Why? Because all of that revenue is artificially being propped up. It’s not being driven by market demand where you’re being forced to compete. It’s because of regulatory capture where you now get an artificial constraint. But it only works in one market.
“All roads lead to market chaos if anybody gets involved, so we should just not get involved.”
Palihapitiya’s co-host, former AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, went further, accusing Anthropic of running to Washington for regulatory cover.
“This is literally the most successful tech company of all time, and they’re racing to the government to basically say you need to protect us against our competitors. Not just our Chinese competitors, our American competitors,” Sacks said. “Frankly, it’s gross.”
“This is literally the most successful tech company of all time, and they’re racing to the government to basically say you need to protect us against our competitors… Frankly, it’s gross.” – David Sacks
“If you say that American companies can’t use what’s in the public domain, or that somehow it’s tainted with IP theft, you are basically going to put a dagger through the heart of the entire American open source ecosystem,” he added.
The fight has consumed Washington since Moonshot AI’s release of Kimi K3. The Beijing startup’s open-weight model beat Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol in blind front-end coding tests, according to Axios, and unlike its closed American rivals, anyone can download it.
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and more than 20 other companies fired off a joint letter on Friday urging policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” on open-weight models, warning that such limits would “stifle competition or drive innovation overseas,” CNBC reported.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
If the letter was meant to cool things off, it didn’t. The Trump administration spent the week accusing Moonshot of stealing American technology outright. White House science chief Michael Kratsios said Wednesday that Moonshot built Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic’s technology, and accused the startup of obtaining restricted Nvidia GB300 chips through servers in Thailand.
We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable. They developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models… acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also weighed in, writing on X: “We support open-source AI and the innovation it unlocks. But open source is not open season on American IP. When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.”
We support open-source AI and the innovation it unlocks. But open source is not open season on American IP. When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.
— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) July 22, 2026
However, there were signs over the weekend the open-source camp may be winning. Luther Lowe, head of public policy at Y Combinator, posted on X that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told him at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “This White House will protect open source AI.”
I had a chance to chat with @howardlutnick tonight at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and he said directly to me: “This White House will protect open source AI.”
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren has blasted the Clarity Act draft bill, claiming it would allow criminals and cartels to move money.
Speaking in a video statement on X Wednesday, Warren hinted that the potential law would allow President Donald Trump to make money from crypto.
Lawmakers are currently mulling over the latest draft of the Clarity Act, which aims to set in stone digital asset regulation. The latest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto.
“This latest draft bill would make it easier for criminals, oh, and cartels and terrorists to move money and finance their operations — and it fails to protect investors and our financial system,” Warren said in the video.
“It’s going to a vote on the floor. There’s a glaring omission: it does not stop Donald Trump from cashing in on his presidency.”
“This isn’t regulation — this is a giveaway. This bill should be dead on arrival,” added Warren.
The new draft of the Senate GOP crypto bill does nothing to stop President Trump from making his next $1.4 billion from crypto.
But X users added clarification to Warren’s video, highlighting that the Senate GOP’s updated draft includes ethics provisions banning federal officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets.
Trump’s crypto ventures
Warren has long been a crypto critic, initially arguing that billions of dollars go missing every year thanks to tax dodging crypto users.
Most recently, Warren has called for a probe into the Trump family’s top crypto ventures.
President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space but some Washington lawmakers have criticized the way the Trump family has profited from digital asset ventures, such as the Republican’s meme coin, TRUMP, and World Liberty Financial project.
Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest.
Latest Clarity Bill
Senate Republicans began circulating new text of the bill this week, ahead of a possible floor vote.
US banking representatives, regulators and crypto bigwigs have been meeting at the White House to work on the Clarity Act since last year.
The bill was passed by the House of Representatives but banking chiefs raised concerns over stablecoins and the yield they will potentially pay customers.
Banking representatives have warned they could lose their deposit base and, in turn, their ability to lend to U.S. businesses if companies are allowed to pay rewards on stablecoins.
On Thursday, Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon became one of the first big bankers to throw his support behind the bill.
Left-Wing Activists Rush To Defend Islamic Migrants After Attack On Berlin Pride Parade
Is “suicidal empathy” the real cause of the western world’s immigration crisis? Or, is the political left completely devoid of empathy? Is the multicultural agenda so important to them that they’re willing to sacrifice their own people to protect it?
The problem of “intersectionality” and engineered mass immigration is that progressive ideals are not shared or respected by most cultures. Leftists envision a sweeping coalition of socialist and minority groups joining forces to destroy the “evil colonial west”, but they seem to be ignoring the fact that foreign elements entering Europe and the US hate liberals as much as they hate conservatives.
This might not be stupidity – it might be a calculated risk on the part of woke leaders who are happy to throw a few of their “comrades” to the third world wolves in the service of the “greater good.” A common tactic of Antifa and related organizations in the face of a terror attack or criminal event that makes them look bad is to counter by diverting the public discourse. The pattern is undeniable and undoubtedly well planned.
For example, public information on the assassination of Charlie Kirk was immediately diverted with false claims that the shooting suspect (Tyler Robinson) is “right wing”. When that narrative fell apart, they fabricated an elaborate conspiracy theory blaming Israel, Kirk’s own organization and his wife.
As it turns out, Robinson confessed to his family members and his transgender partner that he committed the murder. The fraudulent theories have been destroyed by the evidence, but the mission was already accomplished – Leftists and their allies were able to derail public outrage and avoid retribution.
Jimmy Kimmel said the Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson was MAGA. Is he right?pic.twitter.com/n6fhA8mr2k
When a minority or migrant commits a heinous crime against a white person, activist groups organize protest events against “whiteness”, as if white people are liable for the actions of minorities.
When attacks on LGBT groups are committed by Muslim suspects, progressives often step in and protest: Not against Islam, but against western conservatives as the cause of the violence. The slaughter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida is often associated with US conservative movements; the fact that the perpetrator (Omar Mateen) was Muslim is completely washed over.
Someone else is always the culprit and leftists and their “allies” always escape scrutiny.
Now, we see the same pattern in Germany where a Muslim (Abdul Ballout) was shot and killed after ramming a vehicle through a pride parade, killing one person and injuring 29 others. Leftists are desperate to divert attention away from the Islamic issue and they are brazenly blaming conservatives for the attack.
The organizers of the parade have made a public statement admonishing anyone who points out that the attack once again proves that Muslim immigration into Europe is a problem. They assert that the attempted mass murder should not be used to “create division” and at no point did they cite Islam as a potential motivating ideology.
“People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. As the CSD in Berlin, we will not allow this.”
The organisers of Berlin Pride say yesterday’s attack must not be used “for political ends”.
Activists have rushed to social media to scapegoat the right wing. In many cases, simply acknowledging the connections between constant attacks in Europe and the mass immigration of third worlders is treated as a trigger for further violence. In other words, the more conservatives point out the source of the threat, the more responsible they are for the violence against LGBT groups.
As expected the deranged left wing liberal blames White men for the Islamic terror attack at the Berlin pride event
Says we shouldn’t blame an entire community for the Muslims actions but blames an entire community (white men) for a Muslims actions 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/b61Ev0rroV
Of course, Christians in Europe are also the regular targets of attack by Muslim migrants. Numerous Christmas festivals in Germany have been cancelled in recent years for this very reason. Muslims keep driving trucks into them and killing people. But that’s of no concern to progressives, and neither is the murder of their fellow activists. They simply cannot allow conservatives to be right about immigration.
“Hopefully it’s a white Christian person, not a person of color” — the vigil speech about the car crash into the CSD now has English subtitles and is ready…
Subscribers skip this queue — their videos get translated first.
“Hearing the news that a car — a man in a car [drove into the crowd]… the first thing I thought was: ‘Hopefully it’s not a Kanake (Muslim foreigner)… hopefully it’s a Christian white person.’ But it wasn’t. That’s where intersectionality comes into play again. We don’t all fight the same battles, but we’re there for each other in moments like these. And that’s beautiful.”
That’s right, whenever these attacks occur, leftists are hoping it was a white conservatives behind the wheel or on the trigger, but this is rarely the case. When it’s one of their own or a migrant, they call for unity and intersectionality and shift the blame.
It’s obvious that the multicultural agenda is more important to progressive leaders than the LGBT agenda. If the woke left actually gets what they want (which is total invasion of the west by the third world) many of their supposed principles will face elimination by those same migrants. Leftists don’t care. What they want is to burn the west to the ground. The ends justify the means.
A newly revealed internal memo from the final days of the Biden administration exposes a calculated scheme to grant de facto amnesty to more than 3 million foreign nationals through Temporary Protected Status expansions, explicitly designed to block President Trump from carrying out the mass deportations the American people voted for.
Senator Eric Schmitt obtained the document, which laid out options to shield vast numbers of Guatemalans, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and others from removal.
The plan aimed to force everything through activist judges and trap the incoming administration in years of litigation. As one post put it bluntly, this was a last-minute bid to protect foreign invaders before Trump took office.
? HOLY CRAP. A bombshell new memo exposes Biden officials in their final days plotted to grant DE FACTO AMNESTY to 3 MILLION FOREIGN INVADERS via TPS, in a last-minute bid to block President Trump from deporting them, forcing everything through activist judges
The memo, dated around January 2025 though erroneously marked 2024 in places, estimated potential new TPS eligibility for roughly 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, 455,000 Venezuelans, plus smaller groups from Ukraine, Sudan and Afghanistan.
The total exceeded 3.1 million people. Senior advisors recommended creating 2.1 million new TPS designees in the administration’s closing weeks, even while acknowledging that TPS applications take six months to process.
Schmitt commented, “My investigation uncovered that the Lame Duck Biden White House tried to keep millions of illegal aliens in our country by abusing the ‘Temporary’ Protected Status program.”
“After the American people voted for President Trump’s promise to end the TPS scam, the Biden administration tried to subvert the will of the American people,” he continued, adding “This was mass amnesty-by-decree. America is for Americans, and it is our home – it is not a permanent refugee camp.”
Schmitt further urged that “Biden tried to turn TPS into a 3.1-million-person deportation shield, protect Tren de Aragua members, and trap President Trump in years of litigation.”
The most disturbing part, Schmitt noted, was the push to create millions of new designees so late in the term. “Luckily, that never happened and we have been deporting Ecuadorians and Guatemalans.”
The memo itself referenced past court battles. It noted that prior federal litigation during Trump’s first term had successfully halted efforts to terminate TPS for countries including Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal and Honduras, largely because of incomplete factual records.
It suggested the Biden team was prepared for more of the same under the new administration. Stakeholders, including a list of Democratic senators, had requested new designations for Ecuador and Guatemala in particular.
One week after the memo’s circulation, the Biden administration extended TPS protections for nearly a million noncitizens. The full 3-million-plus plan was not fully executed, but the intent was clear: leave Trump with an even larger protected population and a thicket of lawsuits.
The contrast with what Trump has already delivered could not be sharper. Under this administration, migrant encounters at the southwest border have collapsed to historic lows not seen in more than half a century.
Fiscal year 2025 recorded just 237,538 Border Patrol encounters – the lowest annual total since 1970 – after years of Biden-era peaks above 2 million. Monthly southwest border apprehensions have stayed under 10,000 for consecutive months, with June 2026 at 9,848, a 94 percent drop from the Biden monthly average and 96 percent below the previous peak.
Fourteen straight months of zero releases by Border Patrol have turned the border from a free-for-all into a controlled line. Would-be crossers are staying home because the message is finally clear: you will not be released into the interior.
Trump Administration senior official Stephen Miller has recently made plain that every single Haitian migrant is going back to Haiti under Trump. The administration is not playing games with “temporary” status that somehow becomes permanent.
We have seen the dire consequences of the open-borders years stacking up. Most recently, an illegal alien was alleged to be the ringleader in a terror plot targeting government officials at the UFC White House event.
The real price of this mass illegal immigration is measured in American lives destroyed. Young women, fathers, toddlers, ordinary citizens going about their days have paid the ultimate price because politicians and bureaucrats treated the border as a suggestion and enforcement as optional.
The pattern repeats without mercy.
In one case, an illegal alien bit a portion of a toddler’s face off and ate it. The horror is almost beyond comprehension, yet it occurred on American soil under policies that prioritized foreign nationals over citizens.
Biden officials wanted to facilitate more of this.
Democrats empowered sick criminal illegal alien predators to prey on women and children. The record is clear and damning.
Even CNN has been forced to concede that Democrats are now cooked on immigration. The public saw the chaos, the crime, the costs, and rejected it.
These are the predictable results of deliberate policy choices that flooded communities with unvetted people, stretched law enforcement thin, and treated American citizens as an afterthought.
TPS was never meant to become a permanent shield for millions. “Temporary” was the operative word. Turning it into a mass-protection racket against the explicit will of voters crosses a line that should alarm anyone who still believes sovereignty matters.
The memo’s authors understood the stakes. They knew Trump intended to end the TPS scam. They prepared litigation strategies in advance. They calculated the numbers. They recommended action in the lame-duck window.
That is not ordinary bureaucratic inertia. That is an attempt to lock in the results of open-borders policies after the public rejected them at the ballot box.
President Trump’s team is already moving to reverse course. Deportations are underway. Extensions are being challenged and terminated where the law allows. The Supreme Court has cleared paths in key cases. The era of treating TPS as a backdoor amnesty is over for those serious about restoring the rule of law.
Mass deportations must be supercharged, not slowed by leftover bureaucratic landmines. The people who wrote and advanced this memo sought to aid and abet the continued presence of millions who have no right to remain.
If that does not qualify as a profound betrayal of the constitutional order and the citizens it exists to protect, the word has lost its meaning.
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Which NATO Countries Boosted Defense Spending The Most In 2025?
NATO’s European members and Canada increased defense spending by 20% in 2025, the group’s biggest military buildup in the last decade.
Created in partnership with Inigo, this graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross, shows which NATO countries increased spending the most and how much they now spend as a share of GDP.
Spending Heavyweights, Ranked by Annual Increases
Our analysis covers NATO countries that spent over $10 billion on defense in 2025.
Belgium was the country with the biggest spending jump of 58%. Once among NATO’s lowest defense spenders, Belgium has boosted its budget to meet the alliance’s current 2% of GDP target. The country’s increased spending is focused on operations, maintenance, and research and development.
The next largest jump among big spenders was Denmark, with a 49% increase. Threats from Russia and a bid from the U.S. administration to buy Greenland prompted the focus on defense. In the Arctic, Denmark is investing in two new ships, maritime patrol planes, drones, early-warning radar, and a new command headquarters.
Defense Spending of NATO Countries Relative to GDP
Among NATO countries, Poland spends the most on defense compared to its economic size. The country began significantly increasing its spending in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. In 2025, its focus has been on equipment, which climbed to over half of the country’s total defense spending.
All NATO allies now meet or exceed the previous defense spending target of 2% of GDP. Most have also pledged to reach 5% by 2035, split between 3.5% on core defense and 1.5% on broader security-related investment such as infrastructure and cyber resilience. However, Spain secured an exemption from the 5% target, and pledges of that length carry their own uncertainty.
Why Increased Defense Spending Matters
Underlying the rise in spending is growing uncertainty around the stability of the rules-based international order. As alliances are strained and tensions build, geopolitical events can create interconnected losses.
Insurance risk managers and brokers can take time to understand indirect exposures and accumulation risks across energy markets, supply chains, political violence, trade credit, and business interruption portfolios.
Rotterdam has introduced an unprecedented nighttime exclusion zone across large parts of the De Esch neighborhood following nearly three years of street racing, drug use, intimidation, prostitution, and persistent noise from migrant youth gangs.
The order, which took effect on Thursday evening, makes it a criminal offense to enter the designated area between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. without a valid reason. Police can fine anyone unable to explain why they are there.
Residents, workers, visitors to local homes, and people attending events, restaurants, or bars are exempt. The measure will remain in force for three months before being evaluated.
“Calm must return to De Esch, and residents must feel comfortable and safe. That is why I am using this power,” said Rotterdam Mayor Carola Schouten.
🇳🇱 Parts of Rotterdam are now a no-go zone because of migrant gangs and anti-social behavior.
The city has introduced an unprecedented night-time ban on entering De Esch neighborhood, with those falling foul of the rules liable for a fine and a criminal record.
Locals told NOS that large groups of outsiders have gathered in the neighborhood after dark since shortly after the Covid pandemic. At weekends, dozens and sometimes hundreds reportedly arrive to race cars, sound horns, consume drugs, party in the streets, and leave rubbish behind.
“Once it gets dark, they go completely wild,” one resident told the broadcaster.
Previous measures, including concrete barriers, increased police patrols, and talks with those responsible, failed to bring the disruption under control.
The first night of the ban was noticeably quieter.
“I slept wonderfully,” one resident told Rijnmond. She said she had previously endured screaming, honking cars, and noise almost every night, even while wearing earplugs. “Now, the street is completely clean,” she said.
Another woman said she had stopped walking her dog alone at night because of dangerous driving and aggressive behavior. Her parents were nearly struck by cars being driven side by side on the sidewalk, while attempts to confront those responsible sometimes resulted in insults, threats, and filming for social media.
“Until now, there was little that could be done about the nuisance,” another said. “Thanks to the restraining order, it is now legally possible.”
In early May, the head of an American chipmaker told investors his company was running short of a material most people have never heard of. A week later, he was on a plane to China alongside President Donald Trump, hoping to pry loose the export licenses his factories needed.
The company was Coherent, the executive was chief executive Jim Anderson, and the material was indium phosphide, a compound that turns electricity directly into laser light.
Anderson went in part to press China over the delays it had placed on shipments of the material, according to Reuters, citing three people familiar with the matter. Without indium phosphide, the warehouse-sized computer facilities behind America’s push into artificial intelligence cannot move data between chips fast enough to keep up. China, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, produces about 70 percent of the world’s supply.
That bottleneck is one half of a broader squeeze on America’s AI build-out. On the material front, China has restricted exports of indium phosphide and other critical minerals, raising prices and stretching timelines.
On the information front, OpenAI and several lawmakers sayoperatives in China have tried to turn the American public against data centers.
Experts studying both fronts told The Epoch Times that the effort has done little so far – but it reveals how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) competes when it is behind.
The Material Behind the Machines
Stephen Xia, a former People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engineer who has been following the development of AI technology, said the AI contest cannot be separated from the materials that underpin it.
“AI competition is an integrated contest across algorithms, data, talent, and computing power, and it is tied to supply chains for chips, electricity, data centers, and critical minerals,” he told The Epoch Times. If the CCP chokes off rare minerals, he said, it would “at the very least slow the pace at which the United States expands its high-end chips and data centers.”
Indium phosphide is one of those materials. Data centers are buildings packed with servers, and as the AI systems running on them grow, the chips inside need to exchange information faster than copper wiring can carry it.
So the industry is shifting to light, sending data as laser pulses through fiber-optic cable, and indium phosphide is the standard material for the tiny lasers that feed it.
China began restricting its export in February 2025, and prices have moved sharply since: a six-inch wafer now costs about $5,000, up roughly 250 percent, industry sources told Reuters in June.
One major supplier, Lumentum, is sold out through 2028. The world’s second-largest maker of the wafers, AXT, produces most of them inside China, where its export permits have been delayed.
Mark Smith, a 45-year veteran of the mining industry who formerly ran the rare-earths producer Molycorp and is now the CEO of the company behind a planned critical-minerals mine in Nebraska, NioCorp Developments, said China’s grip on indium is real but not absolute.
“It’s not 100 percent,” he told The Epoch Times. “If we take a look at all the bits and pieces that make up the supply chain, it’s probably greater than 70 percent.” A few other producers exist, he said, but “it’s nowhere near enough to take care of what’s going to be the demand for these AI chips.”
Even so, he said, indium is a milder case than some rare earth elements “where we have basically 100 percent controlled by China.”
Both Smith and Xia cautioned against overstating what the CCP’s restriction on these critical minerals can do.
The controls “only affect the speed and cost of data-center expansion,” Xia said. “They cannot exert a decisive impact on the U.S. AI industry.”
The reason, he said, is that the United States holds the higher-value ground in the competition – the advanced chips and the software – while the CCP leans more heavily on American technology, from high-end graphics chips to the software used to design semiconductors.
In an all-out fight, Xia said, the CCP “would suffer the greater losses,” which is why, in his view, “even if the CCP had the means to cut off raw-material supplies, it would not dare to act unilaterally.”
Smith also described the standoff from China’s side. When Beijing restricts a material, importers panic – but China also needs to sell. “China needs the technology the United States has for these AI chips, and yet the United States needs the indium to make those AI chips,” he said.
“We both kind of need each other – just in different ways, but for the same application.” He expects that mutual need to force a degree of cooperation, at least until the United States can build its own supply, which for a mine like his takes about three years.
For now, China’s leverage has held. When Washington and Beijing reached a trade truce in November 2025, China agreed to ease its controls on gallium, germanium, and antimony – but not on indium phosphide, which remained restricted into June 2026.
And where exports have resumed, Smith said, China still blocks anything tied to defense. NioCorp learned this firsthand. After it announced a Pentagon-funded partnership with Lockheed Martin in October to develop a scandium alloy for fighter aircraft, the company found it could no longer buy scandium from China, and an attempted workaround through another firm was denied. “So it’s real,” Smith said.
The Campaign to Turn the Public
The clearest evidence of the CCP’s efforts on the second front came from OpenAI, which uncovered a China-based influence operation because the people behind it were using its chatbot to write their material.
In a June report, the company said it banned two clusters of accounts it traced to China. One, which it named the “Data Center Bandwagon,” produced comments and comic strips claiming that data centers were driving up families’ electricity bills; a second targeted U.S. tariffs.
OpenAI said the operators used ChatGPT through tools that hid their location, wrote their instructions in simplified Chinese, and most likely worked for a private China-based firm serving provincial government clients. It also said the direct Chinese effort reached almost no one.
That account rang familiar to Ethan Tu, the founder of Taiwan AI Labs, a Taipei-based nonprofit that uses artificial intelligence to expose coordinated influence operations and has documented Beijing’s campaigns targeting Taiwan’s elections.
Tu, a former principal development manager in Microsoft’s AI and Research Group who worked on its Cortana assistant, told The Epoch Times that OpenAI’s findings matched his own team’s research.
The energy sector, he said, is a recurring target of Chinese and Russian influence work “from Taiwan to the United States to Europe,” and U.S. data centers are the latest version of that.
He pointed to one detail OpenAI disclosed: the operators’ written instructions told the chatbot to feature President Donald Trump but never to mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“They’re forbidden from mentioning their own boss,” Tu said, “but Trump is fair game to attack.” Because the disclosure came from the maker of the tool, which can see where accounts are based and their actions, he said it “carries a great deal of credibility.”
Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who co-leads the school’s Media Forensics Hub and has spent years studying foreign influence campaigns, said he trusted OpenAI’s attribution and described the CCP as “very aggressive” in its attempts to shape opinion abroad.
Beijing pours resources into controlling how the world sees China, he told The Epoch Times, and works hardest to bury narratives that make it look bad, including by harassing Chinese diaspora communities.
On the use of AI to run fake accounts, Linvill said China was “still experimenting.” For now, he said, “they aren’t very good yet. But they are getting better.”
Washington Sounds the Alarm
Officials in Washington have made broader claims. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an audience at a policy discussion hosted by Breitbart News in May that state efforts to ban AI data centers are “not organic and local,” and that “some of this is foreign-source dark money coming in.”
Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to examine foreign influence campaigns about the build-out, and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, said his investigators had traced Chinese money to U.S. nonprofits organizing the protests and pressed the Treasury Department to revoke their tax-exempt status.
The groups most often named sit within a network funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman who lives in Shanghai and, according to a 2023 New York Times investigation, finances left-wing/Marxist-oriented 501(c)(3) organizations around the world that echo the CCP’s positions.
They include the anti-war group CODEPINK, The People’s Forum, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which are all under congressional scrutiny.
The three Singham-linked groups did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
Other groups behind opposition voices describe motives closer to home. Residents “want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come,” said Elizabeth Hutchings, communications manager of Alliance for a Better Utah, which has fought a major data-center project in that state and denies any foreign hand in its work. The group’s core concern, she told The Epoch Times, is “a lack of transparency” from the government.
The experts who study these campaigns warn against mistaking foreign manipulation for the source of the backlash.
Taipei-based Tu put it most plainly: the manipulation is real, and so is the grievance it feeds on. The claim the bots push – that data centers compete with households for power and can raise electricity bills – is “actually true,” he said, and opposition to data centers “genuinely exists,” in Taiwan as much as the United States.
But there’s a danger that once people become aware of manipulation campaigns targeting public opinion, they dismiss any and all grievances as manufactured, Tu warned. “When people object and you label all of it cognitive warfare, I think that oversimplifies the issue,” he said.
The influence operators’ real skill, he said, is blowing issues out of proportion – taking “a scattered case here and there” of genuine resentment and engineering it “into what looks like a full-blown social phenomenon.”
Linvill said the data-center fight was plainly homegrown. “This debate real Americans are already very interested in having,” he said, adding that China “may be trying to amplify the conversation, but I’m not sure why they need to bother.”
Stoking divisive issues inside a rival’s population, he noted, is “influence 101.” And opposition to America’s data center build-out is no fringe phenomenon: research group Data Center Watch has counted blocks or delays from local opposition to at least 75 data center projects, worth some $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026 – mostly over concerns about electricity prices, water use, and noise.
Linvill said China’s homegrown Data Center Bandwagon campaign “had no meaningful effect whatsoever” and that this was typical of China, which he said was better at suppressing unwelcome stories than amplifying them.
Xia similarly said Beijing’s direct sway over American opinion was “very limited” and unlikely to “fundamentally alter the strategic direction” of the U.S. build-out.
It was the first time that China has tried to directly influence public opinion. In 2022, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant uncovered a Chinese operation that posed as worried local residents to stir opposition to American and Australian rare-earth projects, warning of radioactive contamination and calling for protests. That effort, too, gained little traction.
For Tu, the issue at hand is rarely the real target. Most of the influence operations his team tracks support no single party or position; their aim, he said, is to push democratic argument toward the extremes until “there’s no room left for a neutral, objective third party,” and to wear down public trust in institutions – courts, the press, elected leaders.
The end state, he said, is a creeping belief that “democracy is really just chaos, no better than China.”
The Deeper Contest
For Xia, the more important competition is the one underneath the supply chains. In AI generally, he said, the CCP still trails the United States, and in military AI, the gap is wider – but the threat is pushing the U.S. military to move faster.
The real divide, he said, is moral.
American military AI is built around what is called a “human-in-the-loop,” meaning a person must approve any decision by an autonomous weapon to take a life.
The CCP, Xia said, “has no moral bottom line in its AI applications” and gives no clear account of what human control, if any, oversees its autonomous weapons – one reason the United States has pushed for international rules on such systems.
The two militaries, he said, could end up developing AI in entirely different directions.
But the CCP’s path, Xia said, may not be sustainable. Military AI freed of moral limits “would first bring lethal risk to its own developers,” he said, “so this path is unlikely to prove workable.”
US Military Forced To Let Some Iranian Projectiles Through Its Defenses: NBC
Some US lawmakers have begun to complain that American troops stationed in the Middle East have become sitting ducks and are in a highly dangerous situation with Iranian ballistic missiles increasingly reaching their marks. This is especially in the wake of the four US troop deaths earlier this month.
The Iranian attacks particularly on US bases in Jordan have been especially fierce of late. Also there are ongoing concerns of dwindling anti-air defense missiles in the Gulf and the region. Fresh weekend NBC news reporting has highlighted these growing problems, and has gone so far as to say that US commanders are having to ration Patriot missiles.
“U.S. military commanders have been picking and choosing which Iranian missiles and explosive-packed drones to intercept and are allowing some attacks through their defenses, amid an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s diminishing supply of weapons that block projectiles from reaching their targets,” two senior U.S. officials were cited as saying in the NBC report.
This is an astounding revelation if true, constituting an admission that American bases and host countries are much less protected than previously thought.
“Military commanders have opted not to expend munitions if they determine an Iranian projectile won’t hit American forces, significantly damage critical U.S. facilities or threaten allies in the region, the officials said,” NBC continues. “The strategy has been in place since the early days of the war.”
While on the one hand it would make sense to not try and intercept a projectile that’s clearly headed far off course into the distant desert, the host governments are likely to be alarmed at these instances of US military defenses in effect standing down.
But the report also highlights that this strategy has actually resulted in Iranian hits on US bases, in instances where those bases are said to be abandoned:
The result of the strategy, the sources said, is that some Iranian attacks make impact, particularly those that are on track to miss their intended targets, inflict minimal damage by striking an abandoned building or hit areas where there are no U.S. troops.
The U.S. officials said there also have been times when the U.S. military has allowed some Iranian missiles and drones to strike U.S. bases as long as Americans are not present. That is a departure from past practice, the sources said, where typically drones or missiles that threaten to hit bases would be shot down.
Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) previously found that during the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury the Pentagon burned through almost 50% of its Patriot missiles, more than half of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems – designed to counter short, medium, and intermediate-range threats – and over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) during the Iran air and missile campaign.
MOMENT Houthis SHOOT DOWN ‘Turkish-made Saudi drone’
US interceptors have from the start of the war been working in overdrive trying to protect sensitive Gulf facilities and bases, as dozens of inbound Iranian drones and missiles were a daily thing back in March into early April, before the tenuous ceasefire took effect. But the last couple weeks have seen a return to a high intensity air war over the region after the ceasefire broke down.
“Shocking 105 million Americans are not working – more than during Covid or the Great Recession,”blared the New York Post.
Finally that’s something.
The graph alone tells the story. You thought that having the government forcibly send millions of people into lethargy and sloth, bankrupting millions of smaller businesses, slicing and dicing workers into essential and nonessential, would be devastating for labor force participation. It’s actually worse now than in the depths of the lockdowns, and 10.8 million more than were out of the labor force in 2019, for a total of 105 million.
The growing crisis of labor drop outs since 2020 hits men more substantially than women: Woman not working up 10.9%; Men not working up 13.6%; Overall number not working up by 11.19%.
The labor force participation rate reveals the trends, not as grim as the lockdown days but still trending downwards – the opposite of what should be happening.
The topic is still taboo – but the longer time goes on, the more scholars and people will mark the Covid lockdowns as a grave turning point in the history of our times. We are now at enough distance to see this clearly in ways we could not. More than that, it was frequently denied.
Today it is undeniable. We have enough real-world data to point to the lockdowns and forced injections as a decisive desideratum of decivilization.
It’s not just the aggregate data that is sounding alarms. We have a generational shift in the works, as noted by journalistic conventions that conveniently leave out causality. “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work,” writes Emi Nietfeld.
“Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work — in fact, they say so themselves — and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible. Who knows where we’ll live anyway once the Earth is uninhabitable. One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that ‘basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.’”
There are many factors at work here including tight labor markets, forced retirements, and self-reported injury. There has been a sharp rise in disabilities post-2020, reaching 38 million. So-called “long Covid” continues to get the blame despite mass forced distribution of a dangerous experimental shot.
We’ve witnessed historic declines in student reading proficiency, as 12th-grade reading scores hit their lowest level since tracking began (1992), with only 35% proficient (down from 37% in 2019). Elementary-grade reading has also dropped sharply, the largest declines in decades, worsened by prolonged school closures and remote learning.
Broader proficiency gaps appear in incoming college students, with reports of 14% of US college students testing at or below a 10-year-old’s reading level. This aligns with K-12 pandemic losses compounding into higher education, hence pervasive ignorance despite high graduation rates.
Overdose fatalities surged dramatically post-2020, with annual deaths often exceeding 100,000 in recent years — a major contributor to excess mortality. Isolation, economic stress, and disrupted treatment access during lockdowns amplified the crisis.
Researchers report nothing but confusion as to why “excess deaths in the United States kept rising even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.5 million in 2022 and 2023 that would have been prevented had US death rates matched those of peer countries.”
Younger adults, minorities, essential workers, and caregivers reported disproportionately worse mental health, with elevated depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation during/after lockdowns. Social isolation directly correlated with higher distress levels in surveys.
Meanwhile, there is no end to the discovery of strange anomalies always attributed to long Covid but which are more likely due to the unmentionable injectable countermeasure. For example, one study found surprising cognitive issues such as an inability to retrieve words and their close substitution which fillers. What immediately comes to mind is the sudden ubiquity of slop language: like, you know, literally, going forward, well, to be honest, and so on to the point of unintelligibility, all massively worsened since 2020.
Total fertility is experiencing a historic decline in the US, accelerating dramatically since 2020.
So much for demographics. Let’s talk economics.
JP Morgan reports that 40-45 percent of small businesses closed temporarily while government stimulus only delayed permanent closure for millions. New firms started out of necessity – old jobs could not be recovered – but with a much higher failure rate. This has led to business consolidation as new firms are a falling percentage of total firms.
Inflation since 2020 has eroded 27% of purchasing power in official data and 37% in alternative measures.
The causal connection is rather obvious: some $8 trillion in new printed money. The result: a third or more of purchasing power was stolen from the public.
This in turn has driven down the savings rates to a low of 3%, falling after boom via stimulus payments.
The Covid period put on hyperdrive a tendency that had been in place for decades, a Fed-forced low interest rate that rewarded leverage, punished savings, and gamed a high return on rising valuations in financials. The savers were the chumps while indebted speculators made the high returns. This flipping of the entire logic of capitalist production has now been institutionalized to the point of addiction. Any stepping away from this balancing act risks default and a crack up.
The indebtedness affects not only individuals but the US government too. The year 2020 was a fundamental shift.
There are so many other inchoate changes that are hard to quantify. You see it in the social interactions of the lockdown generation, its lack of focus and attention, its awkwardness on basic functioning and decorum, its surreptitious and routine duplicity, and its outlook toward the future.
The lockdowns and all that followed were a cruel attack on civilized life. They instigated a collapse of public trust in everything: academia, medicine, public health, government, media, tech, and all the legacy leaders of society. The fallout will continue far into the future.
Isn’t it about time that the elites who constructed these policies at least own up to what they did?
Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) efforts to compel honesty from Anthony Fauci, and Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) indefatigable efforts to chronicle shot harm (they knew the risks), are both deeply honorable.
But they are only the beginning of necessary efforts and they only cover two of the million questions that remain.
There must be truth, there must be accountability, and there must be justice.
