The Current - Anger grows over Kevin O’Leary’s AI data centre in Utah

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

The Canadian celebrity investor wants to build a massive data centre in rural Utah. People in the Republican-dominated state, like Rhonda Anderson Lauritzen are fighting back. The clash is emblematic of how AI is scrambling U.S. politics in the leadup to the midterms, says Heatmap News senior reporter Jael Holzman.

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Kevin O'Leary is one of the most famous faces in Canadian business, a star of the U.S. series Shark Tank and nicknamed Mr. Wonderful. And he's got big plans for a dry stretch of land in the northwest corner of Utah near Great Salt Lake. He wants to build a huge artificial intelligence data center in the Hansel Valley. This is an area he has dubbed Wonder Valley. Here's what Kevin O'Leary told Fox and Friends this spring about the deal he struck with Republican leaders in that state. I met with them only five months ago, and they said,

we can do it in Utah. And they said, we want to build this thing. Can you do it? I said, I've got the team. I can raise the capital. And it shows the Chinese and the rest of the world. We're not messing around. We're going to get this done and move it forward

and provide the compute power to our AI companies that defend the country. Well, when people in that area got wind of the plans, many of them were much less enthusiastic, county officials held a meeting at the local fairgrounds in early May to vote on greenlighting the data center. The public was not allowed to make comments, but they certainly still made themselves heard. Despite those cries of people over profits, the county voted to proceed, but the fight over the data center in the solidly red state is not over and seems to have taken Republican leaders there by surprise. Rhonda Anderson Lortson is a local landowner and involved in the pushback.

Her family runs a mineral supplement company in the region. She's in Ogden, Utah. Rhonda, good morning. Good morning. It's nice to have you with us. Can you just lay out the crux of your opposition to this data center? Yes. So there are several facets of this.

At the heart of it, I think water is a huge issue. We in Utah are currently in an official declared state of emergency because of the drought. And our leaders have been beating the drum that we have to save Great Salt Lake. It is a body of water that is on the verge of ecological collapse. I mean, we're not talking in trouble. We're talking ecological collapse, drying up and leaving Utahans with dust and other really serious issues. So this data center at this time just seems incredibly irresponsible. You and your family have lived in Utah for generations.

You know people and politics. And we heard some loud chance there at that meeting from back in May. But how widespread is the pushback, the uproar over this plan in your state? I think people thought it was going to be just a few protesters would show up because that's what usually happens. But this one has been. different. This has been everybody, it feels like, on all sides of the political spectrum, think it's a monumentally bad idea. And the protesters have been loud, vocal, and relentless, like torches and pitchforks sort of thing. That's the language you used in the New York Times, torches and

pitchforks. I guess that gives us a sense of just how angry people really are. People are very angry. And I don't mean in a violent kind of way, Utahans are polite and well-mannered. but boy, did they show up at the polls. So let's talk about what you said there, about voices coming together across the political spectrum to oppose this data center. Tell me about your own family, because the politics are playing out there, aren't they?

It's sort of a microcosm of what we're seeing. My brother Bruce is very, very conservative and active in local Republican politics. He hates this idea. Number one, we all love the land, right? We love our way of life here. we love the open spaces. I mean, this is the mythical American West. So he opposes it on those grounds, but also it's terrible government. I mean, this top down, telling people to sit down

and shut up is not at all what he believes in from a conservative standpoint. And then we have the full range of political views in my family. So we're all standing shoulder to shoulder on this thing. I want to mention that Kevin O'Leary also wants to build a data center called Wonder Valley in northern Alberta. That's separate from this one in Utah, but clearly he has interest in these kinds of projects because he says they're vital that the United States needs them to compete with China and the AI race to protect itself.

You heard that clip of him off the top. Do you understand the need for these centers and the argument that he's making? Well, of course. I mean, we're all using AI to some extent. I mean, I'm on a computer right now, right? It goes through data centers. But where you put them is critical,

putting them in the American West or in the Canadian West in areas where water is an issue, it's just a terrible idea. So, I mean, as a society worldwide, we're going to have to grapple with where these can go for sure. And so some people who support these things might say, listen, Rhonda, it's all your concerns are, you know, fine, but is this Nimbians and not in my backyard? Like, I just, we need them, but I don't want them near me. What do you say that? Right. So Utah already has dozens and dozens of data centers. It's not, like we're not pulling our load already. And like I said, we're in a state of emergency because of water and putting it on the very northern tip of Great Salt Lake, tapping into the aquifers that are

already down by 80%. It's just a monumentally bad idea. I mean, I guess I'll give an idea of what my family has seen. So our land used to be a beach on the northern tip of Great Salt Lake. and video of me floating in the water because it's very saline, right, you can float in the 80s. And even it was still a beach in the 90s, but every year we've seen that shoreline go out farther and farther. So today, if you stand on our property and you start walking, you would have to walk four and a half miles, whatever that is in kilometers, four and a half miles to dip your toe in the water. Wow. This is not a little nimbie thing. And so you've outlined the concerns over the environment that you have.

But I'm wondering if you also have concerns about just the way this is being done. That has been one of the things that angered people the very most. The public was really not given the opportunity to give comment. There was the opportunity, maybe some comments online. But they never had a meeting that was properly noticed that people knew to show up and give comment. So it just felt like everyone's voices were. silenced. And then O'Leary went on the attack. And boy, people in Utah did not take that well. Okay. So we request an interview with Kevin O'Leary. We didn't get a response from him.

But he has spoken with American outlets. He's making the argument, as I mentioned, that this is good for Utah, that it won't take away energy and water. It will create jobs. He's agreed to now cut the land footprint for the project in half. He told the local ABC station back in June that he may have got off on the wrong, foot with people in Utah. So just listen to just a moment of this. We pissed off a lot of people. And that's not the way I do business. Do you think people are willing to be persuaded by Kevin O'Leary that this could be good for the state? Well, let's just talk about him pissing off the people in his words. The very first thing he did was accuse the protesters of being bused in. And it just simply wasn't true.

There were no buses. Everyone looked around and saw, these are my neighbors, these are people I know. And then he went on Fox and a parade of other places and accused the protesters by name. He called out people by name as being Chinese operatives, as being working for the Chinese Communist Party. And it was so absurd and just infuriating that he would blatantly lie like that. So how much do you trust a guy when that's their first impression? He has walked that back, I should mention a few days ago he posted on social media that he had no evidence that China was funding the Utah critics over the weekend Fox News made a series of on-air apologies for repeating those claims. But is the horse sort of out of the barn, so to speak?

Right. He doubled down on that narrative for weeks. He knew it wasn't true. And he continued to say it on national television for weeks. And then he comes back later and says, well, okay, I actually don't have any evidence. Didn't apologize, but said he didn't have any evidence. Is this just about Utah versus Kevin O'Leary or is this about something bigger than this specific project? I know we've talked a lot about that sort of pitch battle with the main character. You would characterize him as a villain in this story. But is this about this project or is this about something bigger? It feels like it's about a lot of things that are a lot bigger.

It feels like it's about people wanting to say, let's stop for a minute. Let's slow down. This whole AI thing is unnerving. So we're seeing the climate, the drought, we're seeing water, we're seeing the political situation where people are feeling silenced. It's just, it's a lot of things people are saying, whoa, it's just too fast, too much. We need to have involvement. We need to take a minute here. And taking a minute might be what you want, but you have midterms in your country coming up in November.

as you well know, you live in a Republican state. You have Republicans in your family. They have different views. How big of an impact do you think this issue is going to have on the midterm election campaigns in Utah? Well, some of us were biting our nails because we just had the primaries. And in Utah, because it's such a Republican state, the primary really is the election, because that's deciding who's going to get on the ballot in the first place. So we knew people were protesting online and they were sure.

showing up in the comments like in force, but would they show up and vote? Last Tuesday, the primaries happened and a whole bunch of Republicans lost their jobs. I mean, we're talking the president of the Senate, who has been an incumbent for years and years. He's been the president of the chair of MITA, the board that's over this military thing. I'm getting in the weeds. But the bottom line is this guy was booted out in the primary. And the commissioners lost their jobs. Throughout the state, we saw push back against Republican leaders. And I just, I cannot emphasize how this doesn't happen in Utah. It's a very sort of support our leadership kind of kind of state. And so now with the people who are on the ballot, do you think that they might

take another tact or have another stance on these AI data center? I absolutely do. The primary challenger to Stuart Adams, who is the president of the Senate, She definitely gave her support for not supporting the data center. And others have made this a campaign issue as well. So I think we're going to see a lot of change. I think we'll see changes to legislation that make it a lot harder to fast-track these issues. So I think we're going to see real movement. Rhonda, it's been very good to hear from you this morning.

Thank you so much for joining us. Likewise. Rhonda Anderson-Loritsyn is a board member for Mineral Resources International. She opposes the proposed data center that is being backed by Canadian investor Kevin O'Leary in the state of Utah. She was in Ogden in Utah. We'll be right back with more of the current podcast. This week on two blocks from the White House. America's top court is set to deliver decisions on more than a dozen major cases in the coming days.

We're asking will the Supreme Court allow Trump to end birthright citizenship? Join me, Katie Simpson and my fellow Washington Corrists. Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. And watch us on YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Well, joining me now is J.L. Holtzman. She's a senior reporter at the Climate News outlet HeatMap News in Washington, D.C., and she's been covering the backlash to AI data centers across the United States. Jail, good morning to you. Thank you for having me.

It's great to have you with us. put Utah in the story and the things that are going on there into the bigger national picture, how Americans are generally reacting to proposed or things that are actually happening, AI data centers? So what's happening in Utah is a microcosm of a broad national trend across the United States, which to this day continues to be the leading data center development space across the whole world in terms of total number of projects in operation. and being proposed. This is also leading, by the way, to a glut of new energy projects,

especially new gas-fired power plants and pipelines. And so what we're finding is that across the United States, no matter what the demographic, no matter what the region, whether it's an urban community, a rural community, a Democrat community, or a Republican community, people are getting up in arms about the development of large data centers near them. The idea of a data center goes back a long time, back to the genesis of computing, right? The idea of a big warehouse full of robots kind of whizzing and buzzing and calculating to get us some information or some intelligence. That's not new, and that's not what we're talking about here. Specifically, what people are so upset about are incredibly large facilities that require inordinate amounts of energy previously unheard of in order to power specifically,

artificial intelligence computing. I think the one in Utah is something about the proposed one is about the size of Manhattan. I mean, these are not small by any measure. I want you to tell me more about the sort of Americans crossing through divides, because we often talk about your country about how polarized it is, how divided they are. People are either on one side or on the extreme of the other. And as you say, this is one of the issues that is really pulling together Americans, uniting them who don't agree on much else?

It's fascinating. It's one of the trends I cover most closely these days as a journalist. When you look at the United States demographically, the communities that are best to predict where our country is going to go, the communities that maybe voted for Barack Obama years ago and then switched and voted for Donald Trump and started voting more Republican, those are the communities I watch most closely in this backlash, and they are on the front lines of it.

So when you go to states like Ohio, Iowa, even plain states where a lot of agriculture is produced, where a lot of crops are farmed, where you have these expansive areas that historically in the United States are associated with a deep red conservative orthodoxy, we find just absolute disdain for these projects that very closely mirrors precisely. the same level of angst and anger that you see when you go out to a city, when you go out to

cities like Indianapolis and Indiana that rejects large, hyperscale data centers now. When you go out to Michigan and you talk to suburban communities outside of Detroit, for example, you find a similar sentiment. Why people have such opposition to data centers changes and varies depending on who you ask. Yeah, tell me more about that. Tell me how United the sort of reasons are for opposing data centers? I mean, there's so many. At this point, you can just kind of throw a dart wherever, even if it's not even at a dartboard and you're going to hit a reason why someone doesn't want a data center. So, I mean, first and foremost, you're going to hear pollution concerns. You're going to hear environmental concerns. People upset about the potential

for air pollution from gas fire power, from water pollution, from discharges of treated water from a data center, because data centers require, often water for cooling technologies to keep the computers cool so they don't, you know, fire up and hurt themselves. The pollution concerns, though, are also a signal of other feelings that people have, the concern about a negative externality to them. Sometimes these concerns are very real. You know, I visited a very large, hyperscale data center with on-site gas-fired power in what's known as Data Center Alley of Northern Virginia, where the most data centers are currently an operation anywhere in the world in one concentrated area.

That's nearby where I am in Washington, D.C. I visited that place, and this large, you know, Vantage data center's data center was so noisy and so smelly and toxic. It's clearly bringing down the property values of everyone around. And I think that concerns like that are not only valid, but that's a big reason why people are so upset about these projects. On the other hand, though, if I may, there is also a... a sentimental effect here, one that often bleeds into, for lack of a better term, misinformation

or sublimation of emotional fears into concerns in a broad sense. Data centers aren't going to suck up all the water so we can't use them. In the case of the Utah data center, for example, I'm not entirely sure if it's a one-to-one that this large Kevin O'Leary data Center is going to truly suck up all the water in the Great Salt Lake. That's not the issue people are concerned about. That's a sentimental thing. Why is this very large data center sucking up such a large amount of resource at a time when the Great Salt Lake is under threat? So you find these emotional fears and concerns bleeding into very real concerns about pollution and environmental impacts and those undergird a lot of people's feelings about this,

aside from AI itself. I was going to ask about that because, you know, in our kind of country, we have like a lot of people by surveys that are just like anxious about AI and yet we see movement and policy by the government on these fronts. To what extent have data centers become a sort of physical focal point in the United States for a broader anxiety over artificial intelligence? Data centers often don't produce a lot of employment. Local unions that work in construction and welding and plumbing, those are the kinds of of unions that support this work. But those are temporary jobs.

Once the data center is built, often there aren't that many people required. There isn't a lot of people required to actually operate and maintain the facility. Maybe there's a couple hundred or maybe a thousand, but compared to the local fears about the impacts of AI affecting their own employment, whether their job will be automated or replaced by it. that conversation is part and parcel of this. It's the same thing. So what we see is that people's concerns about the broader social change around artificial intelligence wind up becoming a factor in conversations around local employment and the gains they'll get from one specific data center. You know, before I was covering the fights over data centers, I was covering the fight over the transition away from fossil fuels. Obviously now, because there's so much gas, fired power required for all of these data centers in the U.S. We're having less conversation about reducing fossil fuel emissions. Bad thing. But I digress.

The conversation around the energy transition, there was still a lot of employment associated with that. So people could say, you know, not only are we building the solar farm, but we also need the mines. We also need the factories to create all this stuff. Not so with the data centers. There's not that same supply chain gain that so many people could have benefited. from. Rhonda and I talked about how this is affecting politics in her state of Utah and the

November midterms. How big and unpredictable a factor does the battle over AI data centers promise to be in the November midterms and beyond? Data centers are going to be one of the most important issues in the November midterm elections in the United States. It'll be a bellwether for how artificial intelligence is treated in national elections across the world. Data center conversations are going to largely encircle around the impacts. We just discussed local environmental impacts, local job impacts, and how those fit into a macro, broad, socioeconomic change that artificial intelligence and the kind of society-wide shifts of wealth and of job distribution, employment distribution, what that entails. We're seeing this already crop up in

local races where people are facing opponents trying to oust them for approving a data center or approving zoning for it, whether it's at a county commission board or a board of supervisors. At the same time, we're seeing this crop up in congressional primaries. We're seeing this

crop up in governor's races. I mean, personally, it wouldn't surprise me if this also becomes a very prominent issue in the future 2008 presidential primaries in the United States. I've been saying around the office, you know, It wouldn't surprise me if a leading presidential candidate calls for a nationwide moratorium on data centers at this point.

The other factor in these AI data centers, and it is far from a small one, is these big tech companies. Silicon Valley is poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the upcoming midterm in the campaign leading up to them. But beyond trying to influence the politicians, do you think big tech might be thinking about changing their strategy, their messaging with the public to try to work to get people on board? Big Tech has been doing an awful job at getting social license to operate. Canadians are very familiar with the mining industry and the legacy that it's built up, both negative and positive, around trying to foster some sort of trust with local communities in a way where the resource, long a resource, minerals, has been valued by society. We have a new resource, and that resource is data, personal information,

computers. That's the new resource. And in this case, big tech has no idea how to handle communities the way that honestly, even the oil and gas industry and the coal industry has learned how to handle. And so I talk to people in community after community, I talk to people within the data center development space who tell me that up until now, big tech elites have been treating the data center development conversation like they would QA testing or AB testing in Silicon Valley where you can move fast and you can break things and then you learn. You can't do that with land use. You can't just go into a community and move fast, break things and expect different results because then local news crews pop up and tell the rest of the country how you, I don't know,

polluted people's water or made the whole place lose property value. And that kind of reputational risk is something that I think these large tech executives, they didn't understand they were getting into. Lots ahead. No doubt we will be talking again, Jail. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Jail Holtzman is a senior reporter at HeatMap News. She was in Washington, D.C. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.com.