It doesn’t take a business mogul on the level of a Shark Tank judge to know that data centers make up an enormous chunk of America’s economic growth — accounting for more than consumer spending in the pie chart of the U.S. gross domestic product last year. And so multimillionaire celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a. Mr. Wonderful, a.k.a. the bad guy from Marty Supreme, has been looking to get in on the action with massive data center projects to fuel artificial intelligence announced in rural parts of Utah and Alberta, Canada.
But not everything is as easy as it looks on TV. As data centers and their potential effects on electricity bills continue to be political flashpoints this year, O’Leary is facing significant pushback on both projects. He waltzed into northwestern Utah this April with a plan to build a 40,000-acre data center that would require nine gigawatts of power. According to the Department of Energy, one gigawatt of power is roughly equivalent to one nuclear reactor’s output. Known as the Stratos project, O’Leary’s AI data center would be absolutely huge — in fact, with a footprint twice the size of Manhattan, it would be the largest in the world. It would also require more energy than the entirety of Utah consumes today and could raise the state’s annual carbon emissions by nearly two-thirds each year.
