Kevin O’Leary says opponents of his Utah data center are ‘professional protesters’ — and some are powered by AI

• Kevin O’Leary says paid activists and some artificial intelligence-generated activists are opposing his Utah data center.

• Despite protests, the 40,000-acre project received unanimous approval Monday.

• Built data centers are expected to generate and consume twice as much energy as the entire state.

“Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary is defending his plan to build a data center in Utah, which was just approved by state officials despite fierce community opposition.

O’Leary dismissed critics of the multibillion-dollar project as “professional protesters” and suggested artificial intelligence was amplifying some opposition voices.

In a post on

“I’m literally the only data center developer on the planet who graduated from environmental studies, so I know exactly what the concerns are,” he said in the clip released Tuesday.

A Box Elder County data center is facing pushback from those concerned about environmental stress and resource use, a common flashpoint for energy-hungry data centers driving the expansion of artificial intelligence across the United States.

Paul Morris, executive director of the Utah Military Installations Development Authority, which is overseeing the project, said at an April 24 board meeting that once completed, the data center is expected to generate and consume more than twice the energy Utah currently uses.

The entire expansion will consume approximately 9 gigawatts of energy, according to a public fact sheet for the project.

The 40,000-acre project, which will be built over the next 10 years, was unanimously approved by MIDA’s board of directors on Monday, with hundreds of protesters booing and waving signs, local news outlet KSL reported.

O’Leary, whose company O’Leary Digital is partnering with local developer WestGen to support the project, said in a post on

“We can also put a certain percentage of our electricity generation into solar, wind and batteries because battery technology is 10 times more efficient than it was five years ago,” he said in the post, adding that improving battery efficiency could help lower energy costs.

Utah’s Stratos project will be powered by natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline, according to a fact sheet made public by the data center.

O’Leary also took aim at those who opposed the project, claiming that “over 90 percent of the protesters are not actually people who live in Utah or Box Elder County” and claiming that some of the demonstrators “were paid by someone — I don’t know who.”

He went a step further and pointed out that the online backlash was not entirely natural.

“If you look at social media for the Utah proposal, much of it is AI-generated,” he said, calling it “hypocritical.”

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