Kevin O’Leary Halves Size of Controversial $100B Utah Data Center Amid Strong Local Opposition

Kevin O’Leary announced last week that the 40,000-acre footprint of a planned $100 billion data center in Utah would be cut in half. The 9-gigawatt project would consume more electricity annually than the entire state uses. Box Elder County commissioners voted unanimously last month to advance the project.

O’Leary said the negative environmental risks tied to construction were overstated. Crowds of protesters have gathered against the development. He also said he received tens of thousands of Instagram and X comments from the same batch of IP addresses and from accounts he linked to Neville Roy Singham, a left-wing activist with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

O’Leary stated that public IRS tax filings show Singham’s Shanghai-based connections funded groups including Alliance for a Better Utah and Arabella Advisors. He described China’s role in stoking opposition as an irrefutable fact and said foreign agents were fueling anti-AI social media campaigns.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said any place trying to build data centers is receiving foreign-directed propaganda.

U.S. competitiveness. Neither O’Leary nor Burgum offered concrete evidence to support the claims about China. A Heatmap Pro poll released last week found seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers near their homes.

AI infrastructure drew the strongest opposition from Democrats, young people, and rural residents. A Gallup poll showed 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans somewhat or strongly oppose data center construction. 0 have closed the performance gap with OpenAI’s GPT-4.

China leads the United States in AI research publication citations and in industrial robot installations. The Pentagon accused Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD of supporting the Chinese military.