Kevin O’Leary, the conservative investor and “Shark Tank” star, is facing a tempest of bipartisan backlash over his support of a massive data center in Utah.
Against the wishes of local Utah residents, leaders in northern Utah’s Box Elder County voted last week to approve the data center plans. At 40,000 acres, the O’Leary-backed project is set to be the world’s largest data center, more than twice as big as New York City’s Manhattan.
Amid growing concerns about data centers’ impact on their surrounding environments and ability to spike energy costs, public agita toward these artificial intelligence projects — and the companies seeking to launch them — has been mounting. A recent Gallup poll found 7 in 10 people oppose the construction of an AI data center in their area, with 48% “strongly” opposed.
Those numbers help explain the backlash to O’Leary, who has baselessly said opposition groups in Utah are being paid by China. The reality is much simpler: People are wary of rich tech companies building costly, resource-sucking facilities that could make their lives worse.
The fact that this project is opposed by people as ideologically apart as Utah Democrats and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson shows how toxic such projects have become to many Americans.
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The Utah Democratic Party has said O’Leary’s promises that the project will bring substantial benefits to Utah are unreliable, which comes amid a broader Democratic push to spotlight data center concerns in the run-up to the midterm elections..
And in a podcast conversation that went live Wednesday, Carlson challenged O’Leary as to how a massive project like the one in Utah, which is being subsidized in part by taxpayers, could credibly be called “capitalism.”
Asked to explain why the project wasn’t part of a referendum that voters could have weighed in on, O’Leary basically reiterated his previous admission to “rushing” the project because of competition.
To be clear, there’s no reason to think Carlson has become some kind of warrior against the business class. And there’s ample reason to believe this is part of Carlson’s apparent efforts to present himself to the public as some kind of political maverick willing to take stances at odds with President Donald Trump and his allies.
But regardless, the fact that Carlson’s stance saw uptake from MAGA influencer types shows that public revulsion to projects like these is only increasing.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.