Elon Musk's X said its safety team identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts while investigating suspected fake Chinese accounts involved in "influence operations."
Within this broader farm, X said it found 200 accounts "posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate" about American AI and energy policy.
Examples of posts provided by X contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices in the United States and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated graphics depicting data center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense.
OpenAI identified a similar campaign in June, banning a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that it said likely originated in China and were being used to generate social media content.
View this post on X
The US data center debate
The accounts waded into a genuine debate over the impact of rapidly expanding AI infrastructure on household energy costs. PJM Interconnection, which manages the largest regional power grid and wholesale electricity market in the U.S., said it has faced increasingly tight supply-demand conditions amid rapidly growing data center demand. A June study from MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research estimated that new data centers increased residential electricity prices by 2.1% between 2010 and 2024.
However, other studies have reached conflicting conclusions over whether data centers have translated into higher residential electricity prices. In the same month, an analysis published by the New Jersey State Policy Lab found no statistically significant effect at the utility level through 2024, though it cautioned that the latest generation of AI data centers could produce different results. In contrast, research from the Electric Power Research Institute found that data center growth modestly lowered average residential electricity costs between 2015 and 2024.
In March, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI pledged to cover additional electricity generation and infrastructure costs associated with their AI data centers rather than pass them on to consumers.
Musk's X did not take a position on the debate itself, but said it remains committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. "We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy," it said.