How China May Be Interfering in Local US Politics to Block AI Data Center Progress

**Austin Campbell** (0:00)
There is no greater beneficiary in the entire financial system from US dollar stablecoins than JPMorgan Chase. They are the biggest winner. Stablecoins are gonna bring Euro dollar deposits back. That is going to massively increase trading in treasuries, in which JPM is a dominant participant. It is going to massively increase usage and funding advantages in the repo market for US banks, of which JPMorgan is both the largest trading party and largest participant. And it's going to give the ability of US banks to reach globally without themselves having to have a branch in every single location. And what is the largest US bank without an extensive international branch network? JPMorgan.
Right? And so every sign points to JPMorgan being naturally the biggest supporter of US dollar stablecoins globally, just from those perspectives, before we even get into all the markets implication of doing things like seizing equities market share back from Citadel, because you've changed the market structure and can settle with them. So the fact that the guy on top is opposing them tells me good information is not getting up there on frontier topics.
Hey everyone, welcome to Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. We're here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro, but before we begin.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:31)
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**Austin Campbell** (1:53)
All right. As always, I am your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. I'm here with my usual co-hosts, Ram Ahluwalia, Maester of Wealth, Leader of Lumida, and Chris Perkins, the Golden Hand of Franklin Crypto. But today we have with us Sam Lyman, Head of Research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and this week, we're going to be talking about one of their reports. So just to give everybody some context, we have CPI that's remained high. We have Warsh talking about inflation. The House is officially dubbed it Crypto Week last week. But what hit for us was some news specifically on data centers, AI, and some of the context around market. Now, Chris and Ram and I have been discussing AI and the market for a while on this. But today we have a new report and an author about part of what is going on. So the BPI by Sam released a report on foreign influence in US markets around data centers and AI. We'll call it the Singham ground game this time around. And there is a fully interactive national map of Singham's CCP aligned activist network fighting the US AI build out as it was described. So in the report, we see that the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the PSL, ran 21 campaigns across 14 states, leading to 10 local moratoria, one permanent ban, four scrapped and withdrawn projects, and it stalled out approximately 23 billion in AI data center involvement. The funding for this was almost entirely undisclosed. So there appear to be three converging vectors here.
Chinese state media, Russia's RT, 501C3s that are funded by Singham and the PSL, and 2 billion through foreign tied charitable vehicles, including the Oak Foundation. The hard data point is OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts generating anti-AI data center content for provincial level government clients.
So there has been some pushback on this. NPR is saying the theory is catching on to quote, despite a lack of evidence, they claim it's real rate payer water and grid concerns that predate any foreign money. And there's some dismissal by call it labeling from the New American Molly White wrote an article, the data center gas lighting. The believers want an FBI probe and Sam, you have some thoughts on this. So let me start with market context and then Sam, I want your account of the whole thing, which is AI build out has been one of the biggest CapEx stories out there. You know, I saw a chart that one of my friends shared that has it going even faster than canal mania. And that the real bottleneck here remains physical space, build out capacity in these data centers. We even have Bitcoin miners who have facilities pivoting into AI power.
Trump today fused it all, saying, clarity plus AI and China are all intertwined. Don't let China win on either subject. So as we're starting there, Sam, outside the OpenAI account clusters, what is the hardest evidence you're finding? What would you say goes beyond just circumstantial?

**Sam Lyman** (5:30)