Protesters react as the Box Elder County Commission announces approval of the Stratos data center.Natalie Behring/Getty
Kevin O’Leary is best known as “Mr. Wonderful” on Shark Tank, or maybe as the bad guy from Marty Supreme. On Shark Tank, he invests in—or crushes the spirits of—small business owners. He describes himself as an “investor, chef, sommelier, collector, photographer, and musician.” But he might soon be able to add “AI infrastructure kingpin” to that list of titles, as he pushes forward with a massive data center project in northern Utah.
Other celebrities have dabbled in AI. Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures put $30 million into OpenAI, an investment that’s now worth over a billion dollars. Ben Affleck’s AI post-production company InterPositive was recently acquired by Netflix for about $600 million.
Others have simply cut advertisements for AI companies, like Ryan Reynolds’ OpenAI/Mint Mobile TV spot two years ago. But O’Leary stands out for his evident commitment to the game of bringing star appeal to the decidedly unsexy subject of hyperscale computing infrastructure.
He’s the primary investor backing a giant data center project called Stratos in Utah. Stratos, which would be about two-and-a-half times the size of Manhattan, would be 100-percent powered by gas generators, one of the developers told the Salt Lake Tribune. This single project could increase Utah’s net greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50 percent, one University of Utah professor estimated. It’s backed by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, which has granted the project significant tax breaks.
On Shark Tank, O’Leary once said, “The market has spoken, and it’s basically telling you people hate this product.” He said this regarding a line of toddler pants with built-in squeakers in the knees. While the market, such as it is, may be more excited about data centers than noisy pants, there are certainly plenty of locals in Utah who seem to hate O’Leary’s new product.
Hundreds of people came out to protest O’Leary’s plan Monday evening at a meeting of the commissioners of Box Elder County, where the data center will be located. They were not allowed to speak, instead forced to hold signs in the back of the room as the county commissioners approved a permit for the billion-dollar data center. Roughly 3,700 additional people have filed protests asking the Utah Division of Water Rights to reject the data center’s permit. O’Leary claimed after the meeting that the protesters were “professionals” bused in from out of state.
“I’m the only developer of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X. “We think over 90% of the protesters are actually not people who live in Utah…I don’t think it’s going to work out for them.”
This isn’t O’Leary’s only AI-oriented investment. He’s also backing Bitzero, a company that produces “data centers for a greener, more sustainable world.” (His non-AI investments include a cat DNA testing company and a company that mails you potatoes as a gag gift.) Another data center campus O’Leary is backing, in Canada, has been stalled for the past year.
