The Bitcoin Policy Institute says campaigns routed through a small U.S. socialist group helped deliver 10 local data center bans and 4 rejected projects, with Wisconsin as the anchor case, and the underlying civic fight over water, power, and cost remains a real story in its own…
A study released this week by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a crypto- and AI-buildout advocacy nonprofit, names what it calls a China-tied "ground game" network as the force behind roughly $23.6 billion in delayed, blocked, or reduced U.S. data center investment, including four Wisconsin projects. The figure is BPI's, not an independent estimate, and the institute has a visible institutional stake in the conclusion it is drawing.
The report, Foreign Influence Part II, argues that Neville Roy Singham, a U.S.-born donor now based in Shanghai and reportedly under federal scrutiny, has channeled money through the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a small U.S. Marxist-Leninist party, into more than 20 local data center campaigns across 14 states. According to BPI's tally, those campaigns produced 10 local moratoria, 1 permanent ban, and 4 rejected or scrapped projects. BPI frames the PSL work as the domestic arm of a broader Singham-funded influence network it ties to the Chinese government.
The Wisconsin case anchors the story. BPI says PSL worked locally and made financial investments that helped stop a $12 billion Blackstone-backed hyperscale data center campus planned for DeForest, a Madison suburb. Separately, voters in Port Washington, a small city on Lake Michigan, approved an anti-data center referendum in April that limits large project siting along the city's waterfront. WSAU's summary of the BPI report points to "increased support for the Port" project as part of the same influence pattern, though the underlying BPI text was truncated in the version reviewed here and the specific Port claim should be re-checked against the original PDF before being repeated as fact.
The two layers need to be held apart.
The local civic opposition is a real story with its own substance. Wisconsin regulators ruled in April that data centers must cover the full cost of the electric grid upgrades their load requires, according to Wisconsin Watch. State lawmakers are weighing multiple bills that would tighten siting, water-use disclosure, and local-control requirements, according to legislative trackers maintained by WEDA and Wisconsin Rivers. Communities along Lake Michigan and in the Madison suburbs have organized around drinking-water competition, electricity rate increases, and the visual footprint of hyperscale campuses. Those concerns long predate any foreign-funded amplification. Treating the organizing purely as a foreign-tied psyop would erase the legitimate local stakes.
The BPI allegations are a separate, narrower claim, that organized outside money and coordination flowed into specific Wisconsin fights through PSL and Singham-linked channels, allegedly amplifying what locals had already organized on their own. The mechanism BPI describes is the substantive part of the report. Not that opposition exists, but how it was allegedly seeded, funded, and coordinated at a national scale. Whether the PSL-to-local pipeline is as tight as BPI describes, whether "ground game" captures the actual relationships, and whether Singham's funding can be cleanly tied to the Chinese state are all questions that remain under investigation. A federal grand jury is reportedly examining Singham's network, and OpenAI published a separate report in June 2026 on foreign-linked influence operations in U.S. policy debates. BPI's analysis sits alongside those, not inside the same evidentiary record.
The dollar figure deserves its own hedge. BPI's $23.6 billion estimate is built from the institute's own tally of "delayed, blocked, or reduced" projects, using BPI's own definition of which projects qualify and BPI's own attribution of causation. Independent project trackers, utility filings, and developer disclosures would not produce the same number from the same inputs. Readers should treat it as the upper bound of one advocacy group's accounting, not as a verified macroeconomic loss.
Why this matters beyond Wisconsin. Legal analysts at Husch Blackwell frame the state as the leading edge of a "data center reckoning" they expect to spread to other capitals. If BPI's framing holds up, the same pipeline will look for the next local fight, and siting battles already opening in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio are obvious invitations. If BPI's framing is overstated, the report still hands the AI-buildout side a template for recharacterizing local environmental opposition as foreign interference, which is its own kind of risk for the people doing the organizing on the ground.
What to watch next: the Wisconsin legislature's final disposition of data center siting bills before session ends, any federal filings or indictments emerging from the Singham grand jury, and whether BPI or independent researchers publish the underlying project list that produces the $23.6 billion figure. Counter-narratives from PSL, from environmental groups named in the report, and from independent researchers of China-tied influence are not in the current public record and should be sought before the story is treated as settled.