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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.
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