Lawmakers Want the Attorney General to Investigate Whether China Is Bankrolling the Fight Against American Data Centers. No One Has Been Charged.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a formal letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on June 10, 2026, asking the Justice Department to investigate whether a Chinese Communist Party-linked funding network is bankrolling local opposition to American data-center and AI infrastructure. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) made a similar request, tied specifically to a fight over a proposed project in Frederick County, Virginia.
At the center of both requests is Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American who sold his software company for $785 million in 2017 and has since funneled money into a network of nonprofits that reports say organized opposition to data-center construction nationwide. His broader finances are already under a federal grand-jury investigation in New York — a case that predates this specific request.
DOJ has not opened a formal probe into the data-center-opposition angle itself, and did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment. What exists right now is a stack of congressional letters, one adjacent grand jury, and a separate House committee document demand — not a new, opened investigation into this specific question.
- $278M — Singham funneled into six nonprofits between 2017 and 2023, per a Bitcoin Policy Institute report
- $23.6B — in AI/data-center investment reportedly stalled or blocked across 14 states amid the funding network's activity
- 54 — local moratoriums on data-center construction passed nationwide, per the same report
- $39M — in a separate, non-China-tied stream — Swiss, British, and Danish foundation money into 12 U.S. groups, per the American Energy Institute
Cotton’s June 10 letter to Blanche lays out the concern in blunt terms. “Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers,” he wrote. The letter closes on the specific legal gap Cotton wants closed: “Yet no entity in the network has been charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). I therefore request that the DOJ launch a full investigation into these matters.”
Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) tied the same concern to a live fight: opposition to a proposed AI data-center project in Frederick County, Virginia. “We know historically, that they have funded [nongovernmental organizations] and nonprofits that don’t disclose donations,” Gooden told Fox News Digital. “And then, they use these foreign funds against us.”
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), joined by Reps. Bob Latta (R-OH) and John Joyce (R-PA), sent a parallel letter to a different recipient entirely — FBI Director Kash Patel — asking the bureau to open its own look at the same funding network. Three separate Republican-led offices arrived at the same request within weeks of each other: investigate whether Beijing money is behind the opposition.
The name that surfaces in nearly every version of this story is Neville Roy Singham. He built his fortune in Chicago, selling the software consultancy ThoughtWorks for $785 million in 2017, and has lived in Shanghai for years since. Reporting from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the Washington Free Beacon, the Washington Times, and the Daily Caller has separately traced his money into a network of nonprofits — including groups tied to CodePink, Tricontinental, BreakThrough News, and The People’s Forum — that have organized opposition to data-center and AI infrastructure projects in multiple states.
That funding trail is not news to Congress. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) has already sent document demands — the kind of request that can escalate into a subpoena — to three of the named nonprofits: BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and The People’s Forum. That inquiry runs on its own track, separate from the Cotton and Guthrie letters, but points at the same money.
Rep. Jason Smith says some anti-data-center nonprofits with China ties should be penalized, as his Ways and Means Committee presses document demands on BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and The People's Forum.
Sam Lyman, the Bitcoin Policy Institute researcher whose May 18, 2026 report put a dollar figure on the funding, has argued the pattern deserves federal scrutiny regardless of where it ultimately leads. Journalist Asra Nomani has gone further, describing the alliance between Singham and Chinese state interests as “unprecedented.”
It’s worth being precise about what is, and isn’t, happening inside the Justice Department. A federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York, authorized by Blanche and led by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, is investigating Singham’s financial activity broadly — a FARA-adjacent matter that predates Cotton’s and Guthrie’s letters and was not opened because of the data-center fight specifically. It’s the closest thing to a live federal investigation touching Singham’s network, but its scope is his finances generally, not data-center opposition as such.
The letters to Blanche and to Patel are requests, not directives, and DOJ is not obligated to act on either one. As of this writing, the department has not publicly confirmed or opened any investigation into the data-center-opposition funding specifically, and it did not respond when Fox News Digital asked for comment. The House Ways and Means document demands, meanwhile, are a wholly separate congressional-oversight track: Smith’s committee can compel documents on its own authority and doesn’t need a matching DOJ probe to proceed.
Three separate things are happening, and they are not the same thing.
One — a Southern District of New York grand jury is investigating Singham’s finances broadly: real, ongoing, and predates this week’s letters.
Two — Sen. Cotton and Rep. Guthrie have asked DOJ and the FBI, respectively, to open a new investigation specifically into data-center-opposition funding, a request DOJ has not confirmed acting on.
Three — House Ways and Means has sent document demands to three nonprofits under its own oversight authority, independent of DOJ or the FBI.
Conflating any of these with “DOJ has launched a probe into China funding data-center opposition” overstates where this currently stands.
The underlying funding numbers are real and separately documented, but several of the reports that surface them are explicit about what they don’t show. POLITICO and E&E News, covering the same research, both noted it does not establish direct coordination between any foreign government and a specific U.S. opposition campaign — the money trail and the on-the-ground organizing are documented separately. Power the Future, which separately traced roughly $13 million flowing to the New Venture Fund, the Sierra Club Foundation, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, included the identical caveat.
That caution turned out to matter. Fox News and Fox Business were forced into on-air retractions after investor Kevin O’Leary claimed specific opposition figures fighting a Utah data-center project were funded by the Chinese Communist Party — and then admitted, on air, that he had no evidence for it.
The retraction is a useful data point for anyone weighing how solid this story actually is. The financial reporting on Singham and his network holds up across multiple outlets and has not been retracted anywhere. But at least one high-profile claim built on top of it did not hold up, and the correction happened publicly, on the same air that carried the original claim.
President Trump’s own position on the China-funding question has moved. At a White House event on coal on June 4, 2026, he waved off the idea of confronting Beijing over it: “We had a great meeting with China, and you know they do things to us, and we do things to them. I say it all the time.” By July 23, he’d shifted toward the same propaganda framing in Cotton’s and Guthrie’s letters: “Other nations are trying to get us to slow down… they are spending a lot of money on propaganda.”
Trump has been far more consistent on a related but separate front — state-level moratoriums on data centers themselves, regardless of who’s funding the opposition to them. He used Truth Social on July 15 to criticize New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D-NY) statewide pause on new data-center construction.
Governor Kathy Hochul, for political reasons, has terminated all Data Centers being built, or to be built, in New York State. Both the Taxes and the Jobs amount to LIQUID GOLD! New York State has made a terrible decision.
Gov. Hochul responded on X: “If data centers are really ‘LIQUID GOLD,’ then New Yorkers deserve more than scraps.” The exchange isn’t about the China-funding question directly — but it’s a reminder the underlying fight over data centers now runs through the White House, not just through Congress and DOJ.
Cotton (R-AR) and Guthrie (R-KY) have formally asked Blanche and the FBI to investigate whether a China-linked funding network — centered on Shanghai-based American expat Neville Roy Singham — is bankrolling opposition to U.S. data centers. That’s a request, not an open DOJ probe on this specific question: the only related federal investigation actually underway, an SDNY grand jury into Singham’s finances, predates the request and reaches wider than data centers alone. The funding numbers — $278 million from Singham into six nonprofits, per the Bitcoin Policy Institute, plus separate non-China-tied streams other researchers found — are real. But the reports themselves, and a retracted on-air claim from Fox Business investor Kevin O’Leary, caution against assuming the money proves direct foreign-government control of any specific campaign.
