‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

that f***** ruined marty supreme i didn’t even finish the movie…f*** that guy

As a Canadian I’m conflicted. Sorry that O’Leary is inflicting this on the US but also grateful he is not in Canada.

Of all the grifters to sell out to, it’s the guy who ^allegedly killed someone with his boat and blamed his wife?

“The only thing he’s right about is that we don’t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.” I just want to once again remind everyone that Kevin O'Leary is Canadian and is **not** a billionaire. Most sports and film stars are worth more than this "businessman" whose claim to fame was charging for CD's of educational freeware.

He went on Fox News claiming that the nonprofit orgs that are protesting and raising awareness against this are actually operatives of the Chinese government. The groups leaders were laughing so hard on our local news that they could barely get a sentence out.

Since you mention it, if one of the several apocalypse scenarios we're staring down does hit, there's a decent chance I'd make a beeline for this place. Utah is pretty, and a city-sized monument to hubris? Sounds like a cool thing to check out before you bite it.

We're starting to reach the point of Max Max 1, unironically. It all began with Oil Wars. Then society started unravelling. Finally, Nuclear War and post-apocalyptia. The likely Scenario? The world does a wild swerve away from the cliff and we just end up living out the First Movie for a couple years before Oil Infrastructure is replaced, political systems are reworked to prevent further abuse, A.I. is regulated and Data Centers are decommissioned when and where necessary. Amongst other things. If nothing else, it'll make shooting a Mad Max prequel/reboot easy as pie.

The landowner sold his sole (land) to Kevin. People who own land in Utah don’t want the government to tell them what they can do with their land. Those kind of policies can bite you in the butt. That’s why the data center was approved.

He's poisoning Canada too. There's a reason why no one wanted to do deals on shark tank or dragons den. He's a sociopath who thinks he's the smartest person ever for selling something decades ago and using that to reinvest in shit that other people thought of. I wonder if the people he ran over drunk on his boat were also Chinese spies when he had his wife take the fall for him.

Amidst all the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels and Donald Trumps of the world, it unfortunately seems to get lost in the noise just what an evil ratfuck piece of shit Kevin O'Leary is. Some people even think he's "one of the good ones" because the propaganda piece that is Shark Tank worked on them. Remember, there are no "good" billionaires. No good person sits on a horde of wealth while children are starving to death around the world. Being good is incompatible with being a billionaire.

O'Leary wanted to be Prime Minister of Cabada and ran for Conservative Party leadership back in 2017. He later dropped out and backed Maxime Bernier, and Bernier later broke off from the Conservatives to found the PPC (Peoples Part of Canada), because the conservative party wasn't conservative enough for him. We dodged a massive bullet with O'Leary who would have been to Canada as Trump is to the US.

Gotta love how racist and anti-immigrant this administration claims to be.... But the richest fuckers that happen to be foreigners like this guy, Muskrat, The Reptile (anagram for Peter Thiel), Murdoch, and so on..? Best of buddies!

"Is it possible to build a data center without rapping the surrounding ecosystem?" "Do you want China to win? Is that what you want? China running the world you evil Communist!"

The girls were laughing so hard on our local news, they could barely get a sentence out. It was great.

Don’t worry it may not be Kevin O’Leary but the American mega corps have already got plans to build 3 massive AI data centres in BC. Just imagine how many are going to be in the other provinces given Canada has a much better geography for this sort of thing.

He would, if he could. Labor, land and electricity is cheaper here in Canada. We have a lot more water than Utah as well. But notice how the oligarchy run to build on "the land of the free", aka, anywhere where the laws don't apply to them.

It’d be a shame if something were to happen to that data center once it was built. I think some warehouses shared a fate that this may one day share from some vigilante.

It's wild that we live in a time where consumers and people in general collectively have so little money that corporations don't even bother with them as customers anymore. This system is going to collapse, and it's going to collapse violently and catastrophically when it does.

Playing with loud rich people who have disposable income? Sounds like a bold plan, Cotton.

49,000 customers they plan to end electrical service to

Well, no, they were told they were switching suppliers for electricity which had already been in the works for years.

Lake Tahoe will be dry, data centers for Ai and crypto are a death sentence to environment and humanity's required resources

I had a feeling the power company behind this would be the one serving the Nevada side. It looks like I'm right, but unfortunately it also looks like the power company that serves the CA side has been buying their power from the Nevada company. I hope the find a viable alternative before it's too late.

Welcome to Unfettered Capitalism. This is what is bound to happen when companies become large enough to simply buy anything and everything that they want, including Congressmen. With no checks and balances (denying corporate mergers, enlarging the definition of "monopoly" and splitting up these giant corporations) this is the result.

That's been the plan since at least the Nixon administration; see the 1971 Powell Memorandum, which laid out the plan for capturing the regulators and media to make America more "business friendly", so we remain too distracted to realize they're robbing us blind and nobody's stopping them/able to stop them.

People voted a businessman in to run the country like a business. So this is what we get. Corporations in charge, not public servants. We're not citizens anymore, we're employees. And we know what companies do when employees become redundant

Yep. Just look at the delegation that went to China.

An evil rich person's idea

People are still believing the old “big factories bring lots of jobs” so logically a big data center will too. Maybe 5 of them will get jobs, the rest get to go gather snow to melt since they’ll have no clean water anymore.

The Utah legislature/executive, and the money-hungry church that influences their decisions.

When a state has one party rule, all you need to do is bribe the boss.

Whoever was looking for c**** land in vast quantities, I assume.

Hes just regurgitating things from the Right, and guess what, it works, so why not keep using it

& then I believe he called people in Utah idiots or something of the sort?

“I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.”

"what good fortune for those in power that people do not think."

Stay strong out there and be loud

Good news everyone! Study shows that a daily shower is merely performative.

Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!

I heard the Colorado river has an abundance and more than enough to go around. I heard the flow is actually increasing over time! I’m sure everyone will be fine!

They only drink soda over there anyway. No water needed ;) 

From your lips to God's ears.

that crowd is guaranteed full of libs, they are still there in a red state

In their defense, they are the only red state this coming election that fought their own government and un-gerrymandered their map. They will get a blue seat at mid-term. So obviously the people are trying to make changes.

Single-issue might be the appropriate tactic going forward, that single issue being "are you for or against the rich trying to kill us all"

>Elections have consequences Utahns voted for Spencer Cox to lead their state, a man who famously campaigned *against* Jan6 division from the rest of his party by making ads *with* his Democratic opponent endorsing peaceful transfer of power and bipartisanship. In the county itself, the local commisioners claim they don't have actual authority to block the project on the grounds protestors are objecting on. https://www.kuer.org/politics-government/2026-05-07/utah-project-stratos-box-elder-data-center-county-commissioner-lee-perry >“If they had chosen not to go through MIDA or anything like that, they could literally walk into my building official here, lay their plans to build this facility to my building official, and under state law, he has 21 days to reject or approve their plan. And the only things he can disapprove their plan for is if he sees something that's unsafe.” >Going that route, there’s no say on air quality or water. He said it’s only an up-or-down decision on the safety of the building. At the end of the day, Perry believes the whole process was rushed. He said he realized the only thing he could do was get the best possible deal for Box Elder County. The board with clear *actual* power over the decision, MIDA, is majority (5/7) appointed by the governor I described above, who was elected in 2021 before any of this AI stuff took off. He was reelected in 2024 in a campaign centered around housing affordability and civility in politics, not AI or industrialization. https://www.midaut.org/board-members >As per state statute, 63H-1-302(2), the governor appoints five members; and the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives each appoints one board member. So I'm not sure which election you think voters took on the blame here. They didn't pick the people actually making this decision, and the person appointing this decision-makers is demonstrably not a mainstream Republican and had no notable track record on AI at the time of his last election.

It's not *exactly* the same, but people should look up what the Salton Sea puts in the air and see if they really want that for themselves.

Problem is that this sets precedents for foreign billionaires to secretly buy up land from local farmers and go around typical zoning and tax laws. This hasn’t just happened in Utah. This has happened in blue states too. We all should be invested in stopping this type of predatory behavior because before we know it, it will be sneaking in our backyard. Every single American should be invested in how this fight goes down.

We actually did not vote for this. The legislature passed the water allocation without a vote.

The Utah legislature is notorious for overturning referendums by the people.

Yeah that worked well in Virginia