Kevin O'Leary admits he didn't get the messaging right on his Utah data center: 'No interest in causing an environmental disaster on my legacy'

“This Data Center Is Everything That Everyone Hates About AI,” one headline from The New Republic claimed in July.

Now, O’Leary — aka “Mr. Wonderful” — says his company didn’t adequately communicate plans for the project with Box Elder County residents.

“We really screwed this up,” O’Leary said in an interview with MS NOW. “We have not communicated what we do.”

Data center debacle

O’Leary’s company, O’Leary Digital, announced plans for a data center in Utah’s Hansel Valley, which a press release referred to as “Wonder Valley” after his own nickname, in February of this year.

Resistance to the project arose not only because of its initial proposed scale — 40,000 acres — but because of the speedy approval process, according to a Utah News Dispatch report.

Because the approval process was facilitated by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), a state development authority, the process “was quicker than regular public processes and allowed little opportunity for community feedback before it was put to a vote by Box Elder County commissioners,” the News Dispatch reported.

After public outcry, Utah’s Senate President Stuart Adams, who is also the chair of MIDA, called on O’Leary to cut the scale of the project by 75%, with O’Leary conceding to cut it back by half, to 20,000 acres, according to the News Dispatch.

But that didn’t appease voters, who ousted Adams in a June primary. His loss was widely reported to be due to the fallout around the data center.

O’Leary’s about-face

Opponents to the data center are also concerned about its environmental impact.

Dr. Robert Davies, associate professor of physics at Utah State University, who MS NOW described as “one of the leading critics of the project,” said the project, at its proposed scale, would consume as much power as two states of Utah or three New York Cities.

In a report published before the size of the project was scaled down to 20,000 acres, Davies told The Verge that the heat generated by the site would be “the equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”

There’s also concerns that the site would sit near the Great Salt Lake, “which has lost three-quarters of its volume in a few decades,” MS NOW reported. The Stratos Project website says the site would be “powered by its own private gas power plant.”

MS NOW reported that O’Leary “initially lashed out publicly at critics like Davies and others,” but now, has “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,” the report says.

“I have no interest in causing an environmental disaster on my legacy,” O’Leary says in an interview with MS NOW reporter Josh Einiger. “That’s never going to happen.”