The Shanghai Billionaire Behind America's Anti-Data Center Movement
Neville Roy Singham: The CCP-aligned American expat bankrolling the war on American innovation.
Something curious is happening in town halls and zoning meetings across America. From suburban Maryland to the Arizona desert, from Wisconsin’s statehouse to California’s San Gabriel Valley, the same pattern keeps repeating: residents show up worried about water use, power demand, or noise from a proposed data center—and standing next to them, megaphones in hand, are organizers from Code Pink and a Marxist-Leninist political party headquartered in Washington, D.C.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has quietly become one of the most visible forces in the rapidly escalating war on American AI infrastructure. By a conservative count, PSL chapters have led or organized anti-data center protests in at least nine to ten distinct campaigns since late 2025. The Dossier found a significant presence in Prince George’s County, Maryland; East Charlotte, North Carolina; Tucson; Springfield, Illinois; Madison and Milwaukee; St. Louis; the Puente Hills; Atlanta’s DeKalb County; and northern Minnesota, among others.
In Landover, Maryland, PSL helped force a temporary moratorium after a string of rallies and press conferences. In Springfield, Illinois, the party turned out hundreds for a county board meeting that ultimately paused a major project. In Wisconsin, PSL co-led a “Beating the Data Centers Statewide Day of Action” that hit the Capitol and Milwaukee on the same day. The chants are nearly identical from one coast to the other: “Hey hey, ho ho, these data centers have got to go.”
This is the kind of grassroots-looking, professionally coordinated activism that gets results. It’s also worth asking who is paying for all of this.
Let’s follow the money to Shanghai.
PSL’s largest documented benefactor is Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire American-born far-left tech magnate who sold his consulting firm and now lives in Shanghai. The New York Times has reported that Singham operates from a shared workspace with a Chinese Communist Party propaganda outfit and has funneled enormous sums into a global network of nonprofits and media properties that consistently echo Beijing’s foreign policy line, from discrediting China’s cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, to anti-Taiwan talking points to anti-American framings of nearly every geopolitical contest.
PSL isn't exactly hiding the ball. In an April 28 manifesto on its flagship outlet Liberation News, the Singham-funded group demands what it calls "popular control of AI" (a euphemism for state control) and warns that the window to act is closing because once a technology gets entrenched under capitalism, the chance to dismantle it is gone. The piece declares America is captured by tech billionaires and casts data centers themselves as instruments of surveillance and extraction against working-class communities. The policy goal is straightforward: freeze, dismantle, or nationalize American compute infrastructure.
The Singham network has poured money into the People’s Forum in New York, BreakThrough News, Code Pink, and Tricontinental, organizations whose orbits substantially overlap with PSL’s leadership and messaging. PSL itself does not publish detailed donor disclosures, but congressional investigators have flagged the Singham network for possible Foreign Agents Registration Act violations, and House committees have been examining whether the relationship constitutes undisclosed foreign influence. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith has set a May 18, 2026 deadline for the People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental to turn over records on their funding sources, or face subpoenas.
Efforts to thwart American innovation are being pursued via a funding pipeline through a billionaire who now spends his days in Shanghai spearheading CCP propagandist efforts, and unsurprisingly, the organizations that he funds have positions on issues that perfectly align with the Chinese government. On Taiwan, AI competition, semiconductor policy, and now American data infrastructure, the Singham network converges perfectly with Beijing’s foreign policy. The House Oversight Committee has recently named PSL among the organizations it is examining in connection with Singham’s network.
Data centers are not just warehouses full of servers. They are the physical substrate of American technological development. In the view of both U.S. and Chinese policymakers, this buildout will help determine which superpower wins the next decade. The Chinese government has made AI dominance an explicit national priority. American hyperscalers (albeit imperfect vessels of American power) spending hundreds of billions on domestic data centers are an essential component of that competition.
Slowing these infrastructure projects down, through moratoriums, zoning fights, environmental challenges, and community pressure campaigns, has obvious strategic value to a geopolitical rival. The far-left’s framing wraps that delay in the language of anti-capitalism, anti-tech-billionaire populism (ironic, given their funding), and conservationist environmentalism. It is a flexible message that picks up genuine local concerns and channels them toward an outcome that would advantage the country where the party’s biggest funder lives.
None of this means homeowners worried about a substation in their backyard are foreign agents. Many of those concerns are entirely legitimate and they deserve a fair hearing. But the people who show up with the megaphones are quite often entirely disinterested in local priorities, and Americans have a right to know whose dollars are advancing those campaigns.
Congress has already opened the door. The FARA inquiries into the Singham network should proceed on the merits, with the same seriousness applied to any other foreign-influence investigation. Local journalists covering data center fights need to start asking tougher questions about who is organizing the rallies, and state legislatures considering moratoriums spurred by these campaigns should understand whose strategic interests they may be inadvertently serving.
Anyone who supports data centers has never lived around data centers...
IMPORTANT NOTE: While this wealthy guy in China is helping funds these protests that doesn't mean everything being said or all there are a part of it. There are people having their land/home taken via eminent domain to enable these data centers. Kevin O'Leary's data center project didn't speak with the towns people to get approval but that of just 3 board commissioners and who's to say they weren't incentivized to say yes? Yes these were elected board members but al in Congress are elected and I hope none here including Jordan would argue that means its all on the up and up and that there's no corruption going on.
Back in its day, the Italian Mafia often organized schemes to combat or counter efforts by The FBI. Just because they did this that doesn't mean the FBI never did anything unethical or even illegal.
The point is that just because there is some well funded protests being done over these data centers that doesn't mean the creation of these things are all on the up and up and that there is nothing illegal or corrupt going on to make these data centers a thing.