Kevin O’Leary is not one to give up.
The “Shark Tank” investor, who also this year took a spin as the villainous businessman in “Marty Supreme,” says that despite all the local resistance to his massive Utah data center, he’s holding firm.
“I don’t tap out. I don’t even know what that means. That’s never going to happen with me,” O’Leary told Business Insider. “Everything I do has challenges. Every deal, every project — it’s never easy.”
Building a hyperscale data center, the kind that powers the products made by AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta, is not easy these days. Numerous proposed data centers across the country have faced opposition, and dozens of towns and cities have either passed moratoriums, outright banned them, or are considering it.
O’Leary’s proposed data center in Box Elder County, a rural area of about 60,000 people near the rapidly diminishing Great Salt Lake, is perhaps the most well known, thanks in part to O’Leary’s celebrity status.
As soon as details began to emerge publicly about his data center campus, called the Stratos Project, Utah residents began organizing against it. The opposition crowded local planning meetings, circulated petitions, and recently filed a lawsuit to stop it.
The backlash got the attention of the state’s governor and senate president, who both initially supported the idea. The two have, in recent weeks, issued new parameters around the development, making it harder for O’Leary to realize his lofty plans.
None of this has deterred O’Leary.
“There are bumps in the road. There’s litigation. There’s misinformation. There’s propaganda. You name it. But if you know what you’re doing is right, you make it, you get there,” O’Leary said. “Persevere.”
Sometimes called Wonder Valley, a reference to O’Leary’s chosen nickname, Mr. Wonderful, the data center proposal initially spanned 40,000 acres. When fully online, that plan estimated the campus would have up to 9 gigawatts of power generation capacity.
That’s gigantic. Most large-scale AI data center proposals are at their largest 1 gigawatt. Many of them are closer to 300,000-500,000 megawatts. O’Leary Digital and West GenCo LLC are developing the project.
In May, Box Elder County commissioners authorized a project area for the campus, eliciting furor among residents who oppose it.
In addition to its vast size, critics are worried the data center will have an adverse impact on local wildlife, water resources, and air quality. They’ve also castigated local officials and developers over what they consider a lack of transparency.
O’Leary says all those concerns are not based in reality. He, without providing evidence, blamed a Chinese disinformation campaign for stoking anxiety. The United States and China are in a race to lead the world in artificial intelligence. Data centers are a key leg of that race.
“For me, all roads lead back to China,” O’Leary said.
O’Leary says the data center will create jobs and economic growth, and that the technology underpinning data centers — like cooling techniques — has advanced to the point that their environmental impact is negligible.
Despite O’Leary’s efforts to change public perception of data centers, Utah’s government has responded to local concerns. Gov. Spencer J. Cox signed an executive order at the end of May that established a “higher bar for data center development in Utah.”
Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adam, meanwhile, called for a 75% reduction in the project area and other commitments in a letter sent to Digital O’Leary this month. O’Leary agreed to scale back the campus and adhere to other requests.
“We’re only going to build 1.4 gigawatts to start, which is sort of like a test kitchen,” O’Leary told Business Insider. The project was always planned to expand in phases.
“What’s good about doing something small to start is you prove out your model, and you show the new technology at work, which is remarkably better than technology was in data centers 20 years ago,” he said.
Although new parameters have slowed down O’Leary’s plans, Americans will likely appreciate the more measured pace. A June Reuters and Ipsos poll said only 1 in 3 Americans approve of the “fast pace” of AI data center construction. O’Leary, however, says that a fast pace is necessary as America strives to lead the AI race.
“Ask yourself, can we build anything in America anymore, or is it always going to be someone telling us we can’t?” O’Leary said. “I think those times are over — well, they have to be — because we’re in a global competition, in an economic competition, in a military competition, and certainly a technological competition.”
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