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“Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary wants to build a menacingly large data center facility near the Great Salt Lake in Utah that would be over twice the size of Manhattan.
But his plans for the “Stratos Hyperscale Data Center” has got locals outraged and spooked. And despite his earlier defiance that he would never downsize his project, O’Leary is now agreeing to do just that after state lawmakers demanded he scale back his ambitions.
Going forward, it’ll be the size of just one Manhattan.
“I have no choice,” a defeated O’Leary told NBC News at the Washington AI Network’s AI Honors gala on Wednesday.
The Stratos facility was originally envisioned to span over 40,000 acres on a stretch of unincorporated land in Box Elder County, and was greenlit by the county’s three-member commission last month.
But locals had been fiercely protesting the data center ever since it was proposed and haven’t relented even after its approval, mirroring the widespread backlash to data center construction across the country. The protests are driven by fears over the sprawling facilities’ impact on local water supplies, energy prices, and noise pollution. Water concerns are especially salient in Utah, where the Great Salt Lake has been rapidly shrinking.
On Monday, as the outrage reached a fever pitch, Utah senate president J. Stuart Adams, a Republican, sent O’Leary a letter asking that he reduce the size of the project by 75 percent to “limit impacts on the region and broader environment.”
“I share the concerns of my constituents and hope Mr. O’Leary responds appropriately and implements the changes needed to address them,” Adams said in a statement at the time.
O’Leary quickly let The Salt Lake Tribune know what he thought of Adams’ proposal: it was “outrageous” he told the newspaper, adding that he thought the figure was a typo.
“I’m not walking away,” O’Leary emphasized, barely containing his rage. “It’s not who I am. I don’t work that way.”
But in the end, he did walk away — or at least, bow to the pressure. On Thursday, O’Leary sent a cordial letter to Adams agreeing to cut 19,430 acres from the project, as well as remove a 620-acre parcel in the northeast region of the project near the highway.
It’s a 50 percent reduction rather than 75 percent, but Adams sounded pleased. O’Leary also vowed to address environmental concerns, agree to an independent scientific analysis of the facility’s thermal load, and to put any excess water back into the Great Salt Lake.
“O’Leary’s concessions in response to the demand letter I sent are a positive step forward,” he said that same day, as reported by ABC4 News. “The concerns raised by Utahns are valid, which is why I have pushed for meaningful changes to ensure those issues are addressed before any project can move forward.”
But O’Leary sounded far more bitter about the saga in an interview with NBC News. He accused Adams of demanding the reduction “for political reasons,” and re-litigated his conspiratorial claims that anti data center protestors were being funded by China.
The details of the agreement still need to be hashed out and formalized on paper, however. So our guess is that this saga is far from over.
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