There are 7,700 McDonald’s stores in China, with plans for 10,000 by 2028. McDonald’s is one of many potent symbols of Americana that’s proliferating in China. Which is the underlying point of a piece about data centers, but that is really about so much more.
As you’re reading this, social media on the American right is awash in posts from conservatives claiming a Chinese “psyop” against data centers, one meant to turn Americans against the very engines of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. The thinking goes that if Americans yell halt, “China” will have a clearer path to AI supremacy, geopolitical dominance, and other allegedly awful things.
Except that DeepSeek, the most well-known China-created AI in the U.S., was recently valued at $74 billion. Please think about that number. And in thinking about it, ask how much of the valuation is rooted in DeepSeek’s popularity within the U.S. tech community. Which is a very good thing.
The more McDonald’s there are in China, and the more DeepSeek’s, SHEIN’s, and TikTok’s that are thriving in the U.S., the better and more prosperous the world is. The genius of work divided loses none of its luster when the Chinese are participating in the work, not to mention the peaceful implications of market goods easily crossing borders.
Furthermore, it’s what will follow AIs like Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and so many more that is what should truly have us all excited. Along these lines, no less than Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has routinely made the point that the largest commercial gains from AI will come at the application layer, and as the immense amount of productivity and thought implied in AI transforms all manner of industries, all the while creating new ones. Translated, Huang’s immense fortune will eventually pale by comparison to those that will follow from entrepreneurs building on his and other AI pioneers’ broad shoulders.
Bringing it back to data centers in the U.S., implied in the popular notion of a Chinese “psyop” is that the country’s best and brightest AI and AI-adjacent enterprises can thrive if the U.S. does a 180 on the data center growth that hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta have already spent hundreds of billions on. Except that they can’t. DeepSeek’s valuation, along with those of Moonshot, ByteDance, Alibaba, and others implies ongoing investment stateside in data centers, which means the psyop alleged by the right implies that China would shrink its own AI sector just to do the same to the U.S.
It’s certainly possible, governments have been known to work against the interests of their people, but for one problem. And it can be found in the growth of McDonald’s in China, along with countless other American brands. If the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can’t manipulate its own people into disliking the U.S. and its myriad capitalist symbols, can conservatives really believe it can manipulate people not their own? Hopefully the question answers itself.
Which is a call for American conservatives to stop wasting their time on conspiracy theories (remember the one about TikTok as a “psyop” for the CCP?), and instead focus their energies on aggressively making a case for data center technology that has the potential to improve health, wealth and living standards in ways that will make the abundant present appear primitive by comparison. A CCP that can’t change the minds of its own people hardly has the means to change American thought. Data centers sell themselves, so let’s go on offense in support of them rather than playing the victim in a weak defense of them.