Pro-data center party in D.C. was backed by Koch, Thiel-linked networks, records show

On a rainy Saturday night in Washington, D.C., hundreds of people lined up outside a cryptocurrency-themed bar to clink glasses in celebration of data centers — the very infrastructure that polls show three-quarters of Americans oppose having in their communities. The party was billed as a spontaneous gathering of 'techno-optimists.' It was not quite that.

The September 27 event, called 'Data After Dark: A Pro-Data Center Party,' was held at PubKey — described by Axios as a 'crypto-bro clubhouse' — in downtown D.C. A thousand people RSVPed on Partiful; hundreds made it inside. They drank cocktails named after Loudoun County, Virginia (billed by local officials as the 'data center capital of the world'), posed in an AI-filter photo booth, and heard speakers defend data center infrastructure against what the event's invitation called 'bipartisan psychosis.'

The party was presented publicly as the brainchild of its host, Jonas Du, a tech journalist in his early twenties. But behind Du stands a layered network of conservative media outlets, libertarian think tanks, and AI-aligned investors — a set of connections that received far less attention than the event's viral moment, when anti-data center protesters briefly took the stage before being met with chants of 'USA! USA!'.

Three organizations are listed as co-presenters on the party's flyer: Pirate Wires, Young Voices, and The Compute Optimist. Each thread, pulled, leads somewhere significant.

Pirate Wires is a tech-focused newsletter whose founder is Mike Solana, who serves as chief marketing officer at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. According to Gizmodo, Du has contributed to the outlet; his career in journalism got its start in 2024, when he was still enrolled at Columbia, with articles critical of pro-Palestinian protesters appearing in National Review and Bari Weiss' The Free Press.

The second co-presenter, Young Voices, calls itself a 'nonprofit talent agency for classical liberal writers, creators, and commentators ages 18-35.' Before becoming CEO — a role that made him one of the three organizers of the party — Casey Given held positions at the conservative think tanks Students for Liberty and Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Young Voices spun off from Students for Liberty as its own nonprofit in 2016. According to Gizmodo, the organization has received funding from the Koch Institute and the Atlas Network, a free-market umbrella group also funded by the Kochs.

Gizmodo reports that the Young Voices board of directors includes an executive from The Fund for American Studies, the managing director of an AI-reliant fintech company, an AI-focused venture capitalist, and Jared Meyer — who serves as a senior adviser at the Cicero Institute, an organization aligned with Trump ally Joe Lonsdale, and who previously worked as an economic adviser at the Department of Labor during Trump's first administration.

Gizmodo also reports that Du has earned recognition channeled through this same network: a National Security Fellowship from the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and a Media Acceleration fellowship from The Fund for American Studies — the organization that also has a representative sitting on the Young Voices board.

Ed Tarnowski, whom The Washington Sun identifies as a resident fellow at the free-market think tank R Street Institute, launched the third co-presenter — a pro-Big Tech Substack called The Compute Optimist — two weeks before the party took place. Tarnowski, like Du, is also listed as a bookable commentator through Young Voices.

The Washington Sun, which had reporters at the event, described the crowd as a mix of engineers, small AI-company executives, nonprofit workers, a bitcoin mining operation owner, federal workers, trade group representatives, and the parliamentarian of Rhode Island's Republican Party — alongside, by the outlet's account, 'lots of journalists.'

So much of this conversation felt constrained to very specific corners of Twitter. At the end of the day, if you want to make policy progress, you have to put the right people to—— Jonas Du, event host

Nathan Leamer, whom The Washington Sun identifies as executive director of Build American AI, rallied the crowd with a chant backing data center infrastructure. After the event, one speaker took to X to describe anti-data center protesters who had briefly mounted the stage as 'the anti-progress parasitic class of people who have nothing better to do than to complain about the future.'

The event's Partiful invitation framed the gathering as a celebration of 'American innovation' and featured a remixed 'come and take it' flag — a symbol associated with the modern libertarian movement — with the original cannon replaced by a row of servers resembling a shipping container.

Opposition to data centers has become one of the rare genuinely bipartisan issues in American local politics. Town halls and city council meetings across the country have seen residents push back against facilities they describe as perpetually noisy, polluting, and straining to local power grids. Even previously data center-friendly politicians have reversed course as midterm elections approach, according to Gizmodo.

Days before the party, Du told Axios that people mocking his event online were not 'intellectually serious.' The party's organizers said their goal was to gather the right people to find a way past what they see as the central obstacle to data center development: politics.

Why it matters — A party framed as a spontaneous pro-technology gathering was organized through a network of libertarian nonprofits, Koch-linked funders, and Thiel-connected media — raising questions about who is shaping the public debate over data center policy as community opposition intensifies ahead of midterms.

Reported by gizmodo.com, washingtonsun.com