Kevin O’Leary has done something unusual for a man who built a brand on being blunt: he has admitted he got it wrong. The investor now says he badly mishandled the messaging around his enormous Utah AI data centre, and he is scaling the project back to calm the uproar it caused.
The concession is striking given the scale of the original plan. His Stratos project in Box Elder County was pitched as a sprawling site of some 40,000 acres drawing up to nine gigawatts of power, a footprint large enough to alarm almost any community it landed in.
Alarm it duly caused. Residents pushed back hard over water use, power demand, noise, heat and the sheer amount of land involved, and the opposition grew loud enough that the state’s political leadership took notice.
That pressure produced a dramatic climbdown. Utah’s Senate president, J. Stuart Adams, demanded a 75% cut to the project in June, and O’Leary has now agreed to shrink it to a single gigawatt, a fraction of the original ambition.
His mea culpa was unusually direct. O’Leary said he had “really screwed this up,” pledging more transparency about construction plans and insisting he has no interest in causing an environmental disaster that would tarnish his legacy.
