'I Have No Choice': Kevin O'Leary Agrees To Shrink 40,000-Acre AI Project After Uproar

After drawing intense criticism for his 40,000-acre artificial intelligence data centre campus, the Stratos project, in Utah, celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary announced he was willing to scale down the project. The Shark Tank investor's plans came after O'Leary drew criticism from state leadership.

'I have no choice,' O'Leary said at the Washington AI Network's AI Honors gala.

The planned downsizing of O'Leary's project came not long after he received a demand letter from Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams on Monday, 1 June. Adams called for a 75% reduction in the size of the proposed Stratos data centre in Box Elder County, from 40,000 acres to 10,000 acres.

In addition, Adams asked O'Leary for more transparency, as well as better conservation commitments, to ensure that Utah's natural resources would not be overwhelmed. That included protecting the Great Salt Lake, despite assurances that no water from the project would flow into the lake.

O'Leary said he understood where the senator was coming from. Adams is running for re-election in the 23 June GOP primary against two challengers, and addressing the concerns raised over O'Leary's project formed part of his campaign focus. Mr Wonderful plans to send a formal response to Adams, along with revisions, on Friday, 5 June.

'I know he did it for political reasons,' O'Leary said to NBC News. 'He has to address those issues, and so do I.'

O'Leary Rues False Narratives

While he understood where Adams was coming from, O'Leary believed that it went beyond that. The Stratos project has attracted significant attention, largely because it has been billed as the world's largest AI data centre currently under development.

But tied to that, he claims he knew where the criticism was coming from. Stratos has become the centre of debate for its massive structure, raising allegations that the data centre would require enormous energy and water demands that large data centres typically require.

O'Leary branded these narratives as preposterous, arguing that people are being misinformed by unknown parties, which has filtered to the public in the wrong way.

'Why are they getting it from a false initiative? Who is spending all this money to put out all these falsehoods and straight-out misinformation and lies and to agitate these people?' O'Leary asked.

Smear Campaign Culprit Named

As far as he is concerned, the misinformation drive surrounding Stratos could be traced back to China. O'Leary suspects one of the major groups opposed to his project, Alliance for a Better Utah. The organisation is allegedly funded by dark-money interests from China.

After learning of O'Leary's accusations, the group responded with an official statement.

'The only foreign interest in this data centre is Kevin [O'Leary] from Canada. It's insulting to Utahns across the state to say that any opposition or protest to this data centre is the work of a foreign government,' the statement read on the organisation's official website.

Adams' directive was a bitter pill to swallow for O'Leary. But rather than dwelling on it, Mr Wonderful opted to look at it differently.

'He's asking us to do a test kitchen,' O'Leary said in a report by The Salt Lake Tribune. 'I'm not against it if it solves this problem,' he added.

O'Leary's willingness to scale down Stratos shows he can work under certain conditions and prefers not to debate under public scrutiny. Regardless, he remains confident that his current project will end up benefiting the people of Utah in the end.

Once his data centre project is completed, he feels Utah will stand out as a model for future data centre development. And to address the criticism he is getting at the moment, Mr Wonderful said that a way to win the trust of the public is to be more open and transparent so that people will understand his intentions better and put the false narratives to rest.