Kevin O’Leary wants to atone for his data center sins
If built, it would be one of the world’s largest data centers, a sprawling plant in the vast open space near Utah’s northern border. The fact that it exists only on paper has not calmed the furor aimed at the celebrity investor behind it.
The quiet approval in May of Project Stratos, fronted by developer Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, immediately blew up in the faces of the longtime politicians who supported it; Republican voters ousted several of them in primaries the very next month, including the president of the state Senate.
The ongoing outcry has mired O’Leary in a war of words with local critics and solidified the proposal as a cautionary tale as developers and tech companies race to build more such centers to meet the energy demands of AI.
If there is one thing O’Leary and his Utah detractors finally agree on, it is that his company failed to provide enough information and reach out to locals before announcing the gargantuan plans.
“We really screwed this up,” O’Leary admitted to MS NOW. “We have not communicated what we do.”
O’Leary’s PR debacle in Box Elder County, in the watershed of the Great Salt Lake, is thrown into even sharper relief by the fact that on the other side of that shrinking body of water sits a data center that sailed through with hardly any controversy at all. It’s what locals and industry observers consider a poster case for proper community outreach.
When Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — decided to build a data center in Eagle Mountain, Utah, developers engaged city leaders early on.
“I think we did set some clear expectations in the beginning,” said Mayor Jared Gray, who told MS NOW the city reached deals on everything from taxes to power use.
Meta, which broke ground in 2018 and opened the facility in 2021, has provided conservation grants to 20 organizations throughout Eagle Mountain, Gray said. The company also invested millions in local schools, underwriting a hydroponic garden for the high school and laptops for every high school student.
The resulting vibe in town? “Man,” Gray said, “these guys really do what they say.”
Meta operates 32 data centers nationwide, and to be sure, it has come under fire elsewhere. In Georgia, concerns over water quality attracted the ire of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the company has taken criticism over its secretive real estate deals in Louisiana.
In Eagle Mountain, however, residents consider Meta a good corporate neighbor and themselves lucky compared to their counterparts in Box Elder County.
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“We here in the West have a history of overcoming hardships and challenges,” including fending off outsiders, said Mare Burningham, who got a Meta grant to study the migration patterns of deer in Eagle Mountain. “I think [O’Leary] just set himself up for a really big fight [in Box Elder County].”
At issue with Project Stratos: the proposal’s sheer scale and its location in the Hansel Valley near the Great Salt Lake, which has lost three-quarters of its volume in a few decades.
O’Leary originally planned to buy 40,000 acres, twice the size of Manhattan. Amid community outrage, he scaled back the size in half, but he still plans to utilize as much as 9 gigawatts of power.
“As proposed, this particular project would utterly transform this entire landscape,” said Dr. Robert Davies, associate professor of physics at Utah State University, who has emerged as one of the leading critics of the project.
Davies likened the power consumption to two states of Utah or three New York Cities, and suggested the heat output could dramatically increase temperatures in the valley and accelerate evaporation near the lake.
O’Leary, who initially lashed out publicly at critics like Davies and others, has since struck a more conciliatory tone despite ongoing litigation over the project. He told MS NOW he still intends to submit permit applications, which would provide much of the information people are so desperate to see. He said he wants to win over the state.
Three months after his project won that initial approval, however, O’Leary’s company has yet to deliver those plans, or even say what entity will ultimately use all the data capacity he intends to create.
“I got a lot of work ahead of me,” he said. “If I’ve said anything that offends you, yes, I apologize. If I’ve done anything that you think has been unfair, I apologize. But I also, with that, would say I want you to lend an open ear to what I’m going to show you in the months ahead.”
Josh Einiger is the senior transportation reporter for MS NOW based in New York.
Olympia Sonnier
