Sam Lyman: China Is Funding the War on Data Centers
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/china-funding-war-on-data-centers-sam-lyman
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/china-funding-war-on-data-centers-sam-lyman-transcript
Published: 2026-09-19
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:07] Sam Lyman: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

[0:18] Marty Bent: I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

[0:29] Sam Lyman: I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

[0:31] Marty Bent: If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. Sam Lyman, welcome to the show, sir.

[0:39] Sam Lyman: Marty, great to be here.

[0:42] Marty Bent: Well, appreciate you coming here. It's been a busy week for you testifying on the Hill. You got Clarity Act not making it through cloture. Got a lot of stuff going on in the world of AI, the effective altruism trying to ruin the effective altruists trying to ruin the party. And there's a ton to talk about. How are you feeling? Are you okay? How's your week been?

[1:03] Sam Lyman: It's been a whirlwind, definitely. It seems like as the pace of AI development accelerates, so are things at BPI and in Washington. But it's been a wild, fun ride, and we're excited for what's ahead.

[1:16] Marty Bent: Yeah, I think for the purposes of this show and our core audience, which are Bitcoiners, Maybe start on clarity, but I think throughout the conversation we'll touch on AI, many facets of it, data center buildout, data center dividends, the propaganda that is being waged against American citizens by foreign actors. And then I think we should touch on the effect of altruists first. But I think starting with clarity, what is the vibe on the Hill based off of this week, the bill not making it? pass the cloture vote? And I guess the reaction from the regulatory agencies, it seems to me that the ball is moving forward despite this bill not getting passed.

[2:03] Sam Lyman: Yeah. It's a vibe of general disappointment. I think after August recess, there was optimism that they could get clarity across the finish line. The president and the White House working with Senate Republicans had made a number of concessions along the ethics front, that really answered about 80% of all concerns Democrats had as far as the ethics issues go. However, that wasn't enough at the end of the day. It seems like even though there were some indications that Democrats would support it, the final vote came out pretty much along party lines. And that was disappointing because it seemed like a good bipartisan compromise. I think if this same bill had been presented a couple months ago, it may have passed.

[3:08] Marty Bent: Yeah. Yeah, I saw— interesting, because there were some Republicans that voted against it. I think I saw Josh Hawley give a an interview, and his argument was that he had a bunch of farmers coming to him, said they were worried that they weren't going to be able to get credit financing from their local community banks because of stablecoins drawing deposits so that users could get the yield. And I was like, is that really the case? And I think this particular stablecoin issue, I'm interested to get your opinion whether or not you think it's a legitimate concern or just some political posturing? Because if you look at what Fidelity did last week or the week before, it looks like they launched their own stablecoin. There's nothing within Clarity or Genius that precludes that banks can't get in this game either, correct? Yeah.

[4:00] Sam Lyman: And that's what was frustrating about this last week when we were testifying on the Hill about AI and data centers. Code Pink was in full force. But also in full force were the bank lobbyists on the other side. We were on the House side, and over on the Senate side, the bank lobbyists were going to different offices pushing against clarity. And that stablecoin issue seemed to be a sticking point with a lot of offices. And from my viewpoint, it was a TradFi psyop at the end of the day. In my personal point of view, stablecoins are an opportunity for community banks to get back in the game, to use stablecoins, launch their own stablecoins to innovate in such a way that they're not going up against the bigger banks in the way that they've been trying to compete with bigger banks for the last decade or so.

[5:38] Marty Bent: Yeah. But to the point of, it seems like agencies like the SEC, CFTC, OCC aren't going to wait for a bill to get passed. I think the SEC came out earlier this morning and said they're going to— what did they announce? A 5-year window, innovation window, where Companies can experiment with on-chain token issuance for stocks and other assets. Obviously, the OCC has been pushing forward with issuing bank charters to Bitcoin and crypto exchanges, and CFTC and SEC are working together to determine what rules they're going to set for different parts of the industry. So at the end of the day, is clarity necessary? Are what these agencies are doing despite the bill not getting enacted into law? Is that a temporary Band-Aid that could leave us open for some exposure after the 2028 election? What's the landscape now that it's not passed?

[6:40] Sam Lyman: Yeah, it's definitely encouraging that these executive agencies are putting forward regulations that would effectively act as the Clarity Act. The concern there, of course, is if White House flips in 2028, all that could be rolled back. At that point though, I think that there would be so much opposition from the digital asset industry that that's less likely to happen, but it is a good compromise solution, at least in the near to medium term, that we have regulations going forward that help implement a lot of the same principles of the Clarity Act.

[7:10] Marty Bent: Yeah. How important do you think that the bank charters are, that they're issuing more bank charters?

[7:16] Sam Lyman: I think it's important. And it definitely legitimizes the space in a way that you didn't see in the previous administration. And it's been heartening just to see how positive the Trump admin has been towards digital assets generally. I think they fulfilled a lot of the promises that they made on the campaign trail, and those promises are being realized now. So I think it's encouraging.

[7:39] Marty Bent: All right. Shifting to AI. You made a splash this summer with a report that you wrote highlighting the infiltration of foreign actors and foreign money into propaganda campaigns waged against the AI data center buildout here domestically in the United States. Went pretty viral. You guys made the front page, was it at the Times or the Wall Street Journal? And you were on Capitol Hill. yesterday testifying about what you discovered in your research. So I think let's pretend like most of the audience has no idea about the research that you've done on this particular subject, what you found, and sort of the consequences or the reactions from the government since you released the report. What did you find?

[8:35] Sam Lyman: Yeah, well, we're— this is such an interesting topic, and we just scratched the tip of the iceberg earlier this summer. and we've been diving deeper, and there's a real there there in terms of foreign influence and the data center debate here in the United States. So I'll take you back a few years ago though, when I was working at Riot Platforms. Riot Platforms, for those who don't know, is a Bitcoin mining and AI HPC company. And when I was at Riot, we were building a data center in Corsicana, Texas. It's a rural county in Texas, beautiful place, small population. What was interesting was there was general community support for the data center we were building until there wasn't.

[15:30] Marty Bent: How did you— how did you connect? Like, what was the reason? What was the, the mechanics of your research like? Like, how easy was it to uncover this or hard?

[15:41] Sam Lyman: Yeah, honestly, AI was an incredible tool and I think it was fitting that we had the data centers helping us defend the data centers, 'cause I burned through so many tokens just looking for patterns in China state media, for example. It was actually a very simple query at the end of the day. I just got on my Claude and said, Claude, I have this intuition that Chinese English language media has been pushing against the data center buildout for a while now. Can you help substantiate this? Just like popped out, you know, multiple different stories in a matter of minutes that documented over the years, not just this year, but going back several years, every anti-tech story that the CCP has been pushing out through its Chinese English language media.

[16:40] Marty Bent: Very ironic.

[16:41] Sam Lyman: Definitely.

[16:45] Marty Bent: And for any of the people who may be in the 71% of poll respondents who would not want to live next to a data center, who may be listening to this, I think it's important to go over the low-hanging FUD and debunking. Water usage is like— For context, for anybody who's listening to this doesn't know, I sit on the board of a data center company historically. We've done Bitcoin mining in the TVA. We've been in the TVA for 6 years now, 5 or 6 years. And so I know this problem intimately. And funnily enough, as you mentioned with your story at Riot, on the Bitcoin mining front, we've been fighting these battles for many years, but water usage is one.

[18:40] Sam Lyman: That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, it's unfortunate too because it's put the data center industry in a posture of defense. I think for the last several months, data centers have been trying to explain to communities how they won't hurt their communities, Which is a fairly easy case to make. But even after you've made that case, I think data centers need to go a step further in explaining how they can actively help communities too. I think that's another story that's not really being told.

[19:10] Marty Bent: No, it's simple things too. I think, yeah, and you've run the numbers. There's plenty of stories that have been coming out. I think it's a bit of a lag effect, but I think the industry or parts of the industry at the very least have been jolted awake. Okay, we need to get better at narrative forming and really telling the story. But if you look at some historical data centers from Microsoft or Amazon in the towns that they've entered, particularly in the Northwest, and they've been there for decades, the turnaround that these towns have had because the data centers are paying property taxes and sales taxes on electricity that have enabled these small towns that were that were hollowed out before a data center came in, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over many years that allow them to build roads, build schools, build football fields, hospitals, whatever it may be.

[20:08] Sam Lyman: Yeah. It's incredible. Quincy, Washington, I think is—

[20:12] Marty Bent: That's the one I was referencing, I think.

[20:14] Sam Lyman: Yeah. Yeah. That's the ideal scenario where Microsoft and other investments into that community more than quintupled the county budget. And as you said, built sidewalks that didn't exist before, just brought incredible prosperity and success to that community when the community was on the ropes before the data center showed up. And now it's the ideal case for what data centers can do for a rural town.

[20:39] Marty Bent: Yeah. And you have this concept of data center dividends. Why don't we walk through that?

[20:43] Sam Lyman: Right. So I am so stoked about data center dividends because I think that this is the winning narrative that can really jiu-jitsu public opinion back in favor of data centers. So what are data center dividends? To explain them, I think it's easiest first to look at the state of Alaska. For those who don't know, in the state of Alaska, they have this incredible program called the Alaska Permanent Fund. With the Alaska Permanent Fund, the oil royalties that the state collects are invested into an endowment, And then the investment earnings from that endowment are then paid to every resident of Alaska every year. It's this incredible program where those payments, which average about $1,500 a year for the last decade, go towards not only adults, but towards children as well.

[24:13] Marty Bent: What's up, freaks? This script was brought to you by our good friends, the Bitcoin team at Block. Bitcoin at Block. Bitcoin was originally introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. We all know that. The idea wasn't just to buy and hold, it's to use Bitcoin in many different facets. Holding is one facet. Spending, receiving is another facet. We've been working towards this for 17 years and Block put together a whole ecosystem of companies to really bring about the reality of Bitcoin as everyday money. So with Cash App, you can buy, spend, send, receive, earn, get paid in Bitcoin. When you're trading over $2,000, you're not going to pay any fees on that.

[27:07] Sam Lyman: I think it will have to be the counties. And if you're an enterprising county commissioner, this is waiting for you. the lock and key to massive success for your community. The way I see it, data center companies might be open to it if they're really pressed. Otherwise, they'll just try to get them built. But I think for data center companies who are on the ropes in communities where maybe they've already broken ground, this is a good option to turn to because it's something that will allow what is a burden politically to all of a sudden become a huge benefit politically for the developers and the county commissioners who have supported these projects in the past. But I think the onus mostly falls on the county governments themselves.

[27:52] Marty Bent: That's one thing I think the county governments need to realize is they have a ton of leverage right now because obviously the demand for electricity is higher than it's ever been and only going to accelerate from here as demand for tokens increases. And I think continues to go exponential as I think we're just Scratching the surface of the agentic economy. I think it was only a couple of months ago that agent-to-agent token or agent-to-agent prompting that resulted in token output succeeded human-to-model token output. So the agent economy is just budding. We just surpassed the point where agents are using more tokens than humans, which is a crazy thought. And then we have robotics. We have endeavors to go to space, which is probably going to be enabled by some sort of AI agentic system as well. And we don't have enough power. And I think the counties have a ton of leverage here.

[28:50] Sam Lyman: Yeah, which is complete inversion of the dynamic from a few years ago where counties were more or less tripping over themselves to get data centers to build. Now the dynamic has flipped in such a way that, like you're saying, Marty, they have all the leverage now. And so they need to use that leverage accordingly. And find a way to make data centers really work for their communities. And I think this is a promising way to do it.

[29:13] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I think on the narrative front too, we do need to get the stories like Quincy out there and the Alaskan Permanent Fund, because if you are a rural community, again, I've seen this in Appalachia where we operate, again, the towns that we go into, for Bitcoin mining alone. And I think the taxes that we pay for Bitcoin mining are— I mean, the property taxes we pay, they're material. The rates, the revenue that we provide the utility, it's material. But once you switch that to AI compute, the numbers get even better. And especially if we're trying to reorient the domestic economy and reindustrialize, kickstarting it with this type of activity is important.

[30:38] Sam Lyman: Exactly. And Marty, you hit on such an important point there. The data center buildout is reindustrialization. I think a lot of people interpret reindustrialization to mean bringing all the aluminum smelters back online, bringing all the textile factories back online. That's part of it. But in the economy of the 21st century, increasingly the bedrock will be artificial intelligence. And I think another way of conceiving of a data center is an intelligence factory. These are intelligence factories and they are creating hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, which is another underappreciated point. 3 million. Which is the highest it's ever been. And you see a lot of these protest groups pushing against data centers, saying they're standing up for the working class.

[32:14] Marty Bent: Well, I think I saw you made this point brilliantly on the Hill yesterday. I was trying to figure out who the congressman was that asked you the question, but your response was basically, you know, it's propaganda because in China, like, the media is not pushing this narrative at all. In fact, it's the exact opposite. They're, they're pressing the buildout as hard as possible while they're using—

[32:39] Sam Lyman: Exactly.

[32:41] Marty Bent: Using funds funneled through Singham to slow us down while they're speeding up.

[32:47] Sam Lyman: Yeah, that's the tell right there. The same Chinese state media that is sowing FUD about data centers here in the United States is celebrating AI milestones back in China. And simultaneously, the same Chinese government is subsidizing the use of energy by its AI data centers by up to 50%. So there's no data center protests happening in China because, A, it's probably illegal over there, But B, it also has the full support of the government and industry over in China, and they don't have their free speech to protest it even if they wanted to. So there is a real discrepancy, and you see that play out too in perceptions of AI.

[33:58] Marty Bent: Freaks, look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? Is I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for 5 years now. Literally this month, 5 years ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had 2 babies, we've had multiple health events, and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills, and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on COBRA as a family of 3 when I left my last job before I went full-time with CFTC.

[37:54] Sam Lyman: Yeah. real conflict of interest if that's what they truly believe. Right. Marty, you mentioned caveman pattern recognition, and I feel like I've been experiencing the same thing. You look at COVID, you look at global warming, which became climate change, you look at AI doomerism, it's all the same thing. You present a doomsday prophecy that is more or less non-falsifiable and people get ginned up and afraid of that and they surrender their rights or they surrender their common sense to that cause. And I think that's what we're seeing take place right now with AI safety. Who's heard of global warming or climate change in the last year?

[40:26] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I think we were discussing before we hit record, but it would be remiss of us not to bring up the impact that the effective altruists are having on this conversation. Specifically, and I think, again, I think we're well suited to address this considering we've seen this up close and personal in our industry with SBF and FTX, who was an acolyte of the school of effective altruism, probably still is. And it's completely insane philosophy and worldview.

[40:59] Sam Lyman: Yeah, it's disturbing. And I think it's A group of likely well-intentioned nerds who grew up in a very secular culture, who've never read the classics, who think the idea of God is a meme, and then they discover basic economics and probabilities and they engineer their own religion on top of that. And what's disturbing to me is that in that effort to fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts, with their own secular religion, I don't think they're just left behind with a God-shaped hole. I think that God-shaped hole is a black hole that sucks into it our humanity and any connection we have to the divine.

[42:36] Marty Bent: Well, and it's, it's funny too that you bring up the divine and God, and there's been research done. If you post-train these models on the Bible, particular verses in the Bible, you find alignment. If you give the, the models the teachings of Jesus Christ, they actually act more moral than if they're being post-trained by the effective altruists who are trying to replace that God. And it is, I think, Bill Gurley had the quote of the year so far. I do think Dario Amodei thinks he is the midwife birthing a god right now.

[43:08] Sam Lyman: Yeah. Disturbing, very disturbing stuff. And to your point, Marty, I think we can solve AI alignment in a day if we just instill Christian principles into it. I think Jesus Christ figured this out 2,000 years ago. And the EAs have disregarded that in large part and are trying to engineer their own morality into it, which is why open source models are so important. Because as good of a product as Claude is, for example, it has that morality baked in that doesn't have a foundation at the end of the day. And if that becomes the only game in town, the monopoly over AI, then I think that will twist people's perceptions of the world. It will inform their own conceptions of morality in a way that will be hugely destructive to society over the long Yeah, there was some great green text.

[43:57] Marty Bent: There was a green text meme floating around a couple of weeks ago about the Bible. It's like maybe God knew he had to send Jesus down when he did in the long arc of human history because we have 2,000 years of the Bible spreading and it is all over the internet and all in the training of these models.

[44:17] Sam Lyman: Very much.

[44:17] Marty Bent: But it gets to another point too that is really frustrating about this whole debate is Nobody can— nobody pushing the doomerism meme or line of thinking can give you a step-by-step process of how AI is going to take over the world and destroy humanity. It's sort of hand-wavy. Everybody will reference the paperclip problem, but it's like, okay, let's walk through step by step how this actually happens. They can't do it.

[44:43] Sam Lyman: Yeah, they can't do it. So much hand-waving going on. And I think that was exposed this last week There is a researcher named David Bellamy. He had this viral tweet where he pointed out that the idea that AI will engineer a virus that can kill off humanity is without any foundation whatsoever. And he has the unique background of being both an AI researcher and someone who has an extensive background in bioengineering in particular. And he just walked through the logistics of what it would take for a super intelligent AI to somehow engineer its own virus in a lab. And not only the logistical complications of that, but the mathematical difficulty in doing that.

[46:19] Marty Bent: Yeah. Not only that, even the big story everybody's been pointing to, and Andrew Yang, he was on CNBC, breaking news to Becky Quick and Andrew Sorkin about what happened with the Hugging Face, and his characterization of it was completely wrong. But there was this anon, I think his name was Lumenscape. I wrote about it in the newsletter last week, but he did this really good postmortem. He did like an individual dissection of the Hugging Face hack, and he made some really good points where the models that were supposed to be sandboxed that OpenAI was training, They were explicitly told that they had access to a synthetic internet and that when the agents ultimately broke out of the sandbox, they didn't think that the internet that they were using was actually real.

[48:03] Sam Lyman: Right. Yeah. I'm of the same mind. I think the difficult thing is meeting people who have that technical background who can break things down in understandable terms, because for the normie who doesn't have a technical background, that can be hard to grasp what's going on there. And so it's rare though that you find someone with a technical background who also has the ability to explain things in an accessible way. That's, I think, oftentimes the obstacle we face both in the digital asset industry and in the AI industry.

[48:34] Marty Bent: Well, it's a good segue into BPI Summit next week and just BPI's posturing in general. I mean, that's a lot of what you guys do on a daily basis, particularly trying to educate people on the Hill So let's talk about the summit a little bit. What can people expect next week? What are you looking to get out of it? What kind of conversations are you looking to push into the zeitgeist of Washington, DC?

[49:04] Sam Lyman: Yeah, we are stoked for our summit next week. On day one, we're going to lay out a philosophy that was pioneered by our resident philosopher, Andrew Bailey. Some of your listeners might know Andrew. He's been a fellow of ours for a long time. He's recently joined BPI full-time. Andrew's going to lay out the idea of cypherpunk humanism, which is similar to the idea of little tech. I think a lot of Americans understandably distrust technology and the industry broadly because they've seen how Facebook has maybe monopolized their time, or they've just had negative experiences with the technology industry for the past 10 years or so. What we are trying to advocate as an organization is technology that empowers the individual, that enables the sovereign individual over the sovereign state.

[52:55] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's extremely important work. Again, even on the open source model side, there's so much work. I think we saw a great example of why this is important this week with Latham& Watkins, a large law firm here in the United States, saying, we're not using OpenAI or Anthropic anymore. We actually bought our own GPUs and we're self-hosting open-source models because we don't want to give that information to Anthropic and OpenAI. And I think that's I think Alex Karp, love him or hate him, I think he's been beating that drum too. And I think it's a good drum to beat because if you think of the implications of having that duopoly take hold and be the predominant way through which people interact with this technology, that is incredibly dystopian Minority Report type of surveillance state that can be erected.

[54:42] Sam Lyman: Yeah, yeah, I see that at play. I think Claude is And Anthropic is probably the most EA-rich company in the space. I think OpenAI is a little bit better, but the EA is strong over there as well. I'm hopeful that the non-EA forces will win out at OpenAI. But yeah, it's, it's disturbing because if we only have closed models, that's a level of personal invasion that we've never seen before, where with social media, I think companies could discern the kinds of things we liked, what our preferences were. So many queries we make to AI models surrender our very thoughts, and they can see exactly how we think in a way that no other company has been able to see before, which I think underscores the need for that open-source AI.

[56:19] Marty Bent: Yeah. And the last question, we'd be remiss if we didn't bring it up because this is a Bitcoin podcast and this is actually the bill I care more about than Clarity. ARMA looks like it had a key checkpoint reached yesterday.

[56:32] Sam Lyman: Yeah. Representative Begich is the author of ARMA. He's championing it on the Hill. And I think it's got a good possibility of getting strong bipartisan support at the end of the day. And so we'll see. It's promising though. We're one step closer to a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which is something that we've been working on for years now. And I think this gets us one step closer to that goal.

[56:58] Marty Bent: What was the step we took yesterday?

[57:01] Sam Lyman: It was— I'm trying to remember. I've been so sucked into the congressional hearing this week. Yeah, you were busy.

[57:11] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[57:12] Sam Lyman: Ken's been following the ARMA updates a lot more than me, but I think it was introduced, wasn't it?

[57:18] Marty Bent: It cleared the House Financial Services Committee.

[57:20] Sam Lyman: There we go. Okay. That's a huge hurdle because that tees it up for a vote. So that's really, really promising.

[57:28] Marty Bent: Is that further along than Clarity got?

[57:32] Sam Lyman: Clarity passed the House and made it to the Senate. And so passing the House means it passed the House Financial Services Committee as well. So as long as it passes the House, it will be essentially tied with where Clarity is at.

[57:45] Marty Bent: Okay. I'm still not well versed on the dynamics of— I mean, I did watch Schoolhouse Rock growing up. It's been a while. I don't know how the process is still still a bit convoluted in my mind.

[57:59] Sam Lyman: Yeah. I worked in the Senate for about 6 years and there's still matters of parliamentary procedure that are beyond me. It's very complicated over there.

[58:08] Marty Bent: Yeah. Well, Sam, thanks for all the work that you do, all the research that you've been doing. I think it's extremely important, incredibly enlightening, and having a positive impact on the discussion around these very important topics. There's a lot at stake here, and it's important that we get good information in the hands of American citizens and the politicians we've decided to allow to make decisions on our behalf. So I think it's really incredible work that you've done and looking forward to seeing you in person next week in D.C.

[58:40] Sam Lyman: Yeah, likewise, Marty. Thanks for having me on.

[58:42] Marty Bent: All right. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.