A top executive at a company that makes billions selling surveillance software to the Pentagon has some thoughts about why you should stop worrying and love the data center. Shyam Sankar, Palantir's chief technology officer, told Fox News Digital this week that the real threat to American AI dominance isn't Beijing — it's Americans who don't want a massive power-hungry server farm built next to their town. He also suggested that some of those Americans might be victims of a Chinese psychological operation. So that's where we are.
The Suicide Line
Let's start with the quote, because it deserves to be read slowly. "The only threat to AI generating prosperity for America is suicide, not homicide," Sankar said at Palantir's American Builder Summit. That is a real sentence a real executive said out loud at a real conference, and Fox News Digital published it approvingly.
What he means is that the U.S. is its own worst enemy in the race against China to dominate artificial intelligence. The argument goes like this: data centers need power, power infrastructure faces community opposition, community opposition slows the buildout, the buildout slowdown costs America the AI race, and therefore the protesters holding "Stop Data Centers" signs outside a Michigan facility last week are, functionally, working for Xi Jinping. Sankar didn't quite say that last part. He got close.
Palantir, for context, is not a disinterested party here. The company builds software for the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies, and major manufacturers. It has a direct financial stake in the AI infrastructure expansion that Sankar is publicly cheerleading for. That context is not particularly prominent in the Fox News coverage.
What the Communities Are Actually Objecting To
According to Fox News's own reporting, residents near proposed data center sites have raised concerns about electricity demand, water consumption, noise, traffic, and whether utility customers will ultimately foot the bill for expanding the power grid to accommodate facilities that primarily benefit private corporations. Some projects have been delayed or canceled. Lawmakers in several states have proposed restrictions or moratoriums.
These are not crazy concerns. Data centers are genuinely enormous consumers of electricity and water. They do place real strain on local infrastructure. The question of who bears those costs — the companies building the facilities, or the ratepayers on the existing grid — is a completely legitimate policy debate that communities are entitled to have.
The issue has gotten loud enough to spill into the 2026 midterm campaigns. Fox News reports that candidates in battleground states including Pennsylvania are running ads focused on the economic and environmental effects of these projects. When data centers become midterm ad fodder in Pennsylvania, you are not dealing with a fringe concern.
The Chinese Psyop Bit
Here is where it gets genuinely strange. Sankar, while arguing that AI will make workers more productive rather than replace them, questioned how many frontline workers have actually experienced AI firsthand versus, as he put it, "imbibing the fear-mongering from the social media feed, which is partially a Chinese Psyop as well."
Partially a Chinese Psyop. He said this at a summit his own company organized. To journalists. On the record. The argument, translated: if you are worried about AI taking your job, it might be because Beijing wants you to be worried about AI taking your job, rather than because AI is, in documented and measurable ways, already displacing workers across multiple industries.
This is a rhetorical move worth naming. When legitimate public anxiety about a technology becomes inconvenient for the companies selling that technology, attributing the anxiety to foreign disinformation is a very tidy way to avoid engaging with it.
The Submarine Parts Story
To be fair to Sankar, he made a real and substantive point underneath all the psyop talk. He pointed to a submarine-parts manufacturer where AI cut production planning from two weeks to less than an hour, creating enough capacity to add a third shift and, by extension, more jobs. "There is no one on that shift who thinks, 'Hey, I got my job because of AI,' but that's actually what happened," he said.
That is a genuinely useful example of AI augmenting industrial capacity rather than replacing workers. It's the kind of concrete case the AI industry desperately needs to make, and makes almost never, preferring instead to talk about AGI and machine gods and civilizational transformation.
Sankar acknowledged this directly, arguing that the AI industry has become dangerously fixated on building artificial general intelligence — the still-theoretical system that can do everything at human level or beyond — rather than deploying the capable AI that already exists across the actual economy. "We shouldn't lose the plot in pining away for a machine god," he said. On that specific point, he is not wrong.
The Summit Was Also a PR Event, Which Is Fine, But Worth Saying
Palantir's American Builder Summit was explicitly designed, according to Fox News, to counter fears that AI will replace jobs. Factory workers, healthcare workers, and military personnel took the stage to demonstrate software they had built to solve problems in their own workplaces. Palantir called this cohort the American Tech Fellowship.
This is smart public relations. It is also, in the context of the broader AI industry's reputation problem, genuinely useful messaging. Showing actual workers using AI tools is better than a CEO talking about revolutionary paradigm shifts from a stage in Davos. But it is still a tech company staging a media event to shape coverage of a debate in which that tech company has enormous financial interests.
Fox News covered the summit without much apparent skepticism about that dynamic. A Fox News poll cited in the same coverage showed 70% of Americans oppose AI data center expansion. That number appeared in the piece as a contextual data point, not as the screaming headline it arguably deserved to be.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the people of rural Pennsylvania who don't want their electricity bills to spike so a defense contractor can run more servers are actually the vanguard of Chinese information warfare. That is the argument Palantir's CTO made, to a reporter, at a conference his own company organized. Sit with that for a second.
Sankar is not a stupid man. His point about deploying existing AI across the economy rather than chasing AGI fantasies is correct and underappreciated. His submarine-parts example is exactly the kind of grounded, specific argument the tech industry needs more of. But those good points are sitting inside a broader rhetorical frame that treats any community resistance to AI infrastructure as a threat to national survival, and that is a frame that conveniently serves Palantir's bottom line while dismissing the legitimate concerns of people who will actually live next to these things.
The 70% opposition number buried in the Fox News poll is the real story here. When nearly three in four Americans are skeptical of data center expansion, the answer is not to tell them they might be Chinese psyop victims and then host a summit. The answer is to actually reckon with what the buildout costs, who pays for it, and whether the prosperity Sankar keeps promising eventually reaches the people shouldering that burden. So far, the AI industry's track record on that front is not exactly confidence-inspiring.
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