On Oct. 10, “Saturday Night Live” put cast member James Austin Johnson in a Kevin O'Leary costume for Weekend Update and had him tell Utahans that he does not live there and that the people near his planned data center are “Sims.” The sketch is not the story. The court filings, the state's own power numbers, and O'Leary's words over the past five months are.
The Project Behind the Sketch
O'Leary Digital calls the project the Stratos Project Area, planned for Box Elder County in northern Utah. Deseret News reported on June 4 that, at full build-out, it was projected to consume 7.5 to 9 gigawatts of power, about double the state's peak energy demand, or the amount of energy used by 16 million people. Measured against a different denominator, the top of that range is about 88% of the 10,277 megawatts of net summer generating capacity the U.S. Energy Information Administration counted across every power plant in Utah in 2024. At Gov. Spencer Cox's request, the first phase is limited to 1 gigawatt, and the campus will be paired with a natural gas plant. In June, after Senate President Stuart Adams sent a demand letter, O'Leary agreed to cut the project area from about 40,000 acres to about 20,000, with roughly half of what remains to stay undeveloped.
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On May 11, in an interview with, now former, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, O'Leary, the “Shark Tank” investor, said the project's opponents were “proxies for the Chinese government” and added, “This is the CCP at work here.” He named two people: Joshua Kanter, founder of Alliance for a Better Utah, and Gabrielle Finlayson, a senior partner at the consultancy Elevate Strategies, according to Deseret News.
On June 25, O'Leary posted on social media that he had no evidence the groups or either individual was funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party, Deseret News reported. The next day, Bartiromo read a similar statement on air and said Fox “apologizes for the error.” Fox's later court filing says it ran corrections on five programs that had hosted O'Leary on the subject in May.
Kanter, Finlayson, and their two organizations sued O'Leary and Fox News Network for defamation on July 15 in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, alleging a “week-long smear campaign.” On Sept. 21, O'Leary's lawyers moved to dismiss. The motion argues the May remarks were opinion and that “no reasonable viewer would take them as factual reports.” It describes them as “argument and rhetorical hyperbole qualified as O'Leary spoke them,” and objects that the suit “sweeps together ten separate media appearances, numerous social-media posts, four different plaintiffs.” Fox's separate motion calls the statements “nonactionable assertions of opinion” and says that interviewing O'Leary “is good journalism, not actual malice.” As of this writing, the plaintiffs' response was pending, and no judge had ruled.
O'Leary has defended the project's size in his own terms. “The footprint was so large because you don't know what you don't know about the future sources of power,” he told KSL on June 4, the slip in KSL's transcription. He told the station he wanted the center “to be the example of how to do it right in any state” and told NBC News he had “no choice” but to accept Adams's demands, which he said were made “for political reasons.” In his June 4 letter to Adams, he committed to dedicating excess water from the project to the Great Salt Lake and to an independent analysis of the facility's heat output.
Pushback Is Widespread and Intense
But many residents and environmental experts remain unconvinced. Critics have raised concerns about the project's enormous water requirements, potential air pollution, excess heat generation, and its proximity to the already shrinking Great Salt Lake. An earlier water-rights application drew nearly 4,000 formal protests, and about 6,000 people signed a letter urging Utah Gov. Spencer Cox to intervene.
Opponents have also questioned the project's approval process, arguing it moved forward without adequate public input. More recently, an Oct. 15 water permit application outlined plans for a 7.5-gigawatt natural gas power facility and a cooling system capable of recovering 90% of its water. But Ben Abbott, an ecologist and executive director of the nonprofit Grow the Flow, questioned whether the proposed water efficiency was achievable. He told KSL that using reciprocating gas engines would require a water-to-power ratio 10 to 100 times better than today's best-performing facilities.
Discussing the alternative combined-cycle gas turbine configuration, Abbott was even more skeptical. “There is not an example anywhere on the planet,” he said. Developers maintain the project would consume less water than the land's historical agricultural operations and could ultimately send additional water to the Great Salt Lake. The competing claims will face further scrutiny as the project proceeds through Utah's permitting process.
The Military Installation Development Authority approved the zoning and a property-tax ordinance on April 24, and Box Elder County commissioners backed the project on May 4. Opponents filed two state-court suits on June 3: one seeking to force a public vote on the county's resolutions, and one seeking to nullify the approvals. In late July, O'Leary Digital and the county asked a judge in Brigham City to dismiss the referendum suit, arguing the resolutions were administrative rather than legislative and therefore cannot be put to a vote. Deseret News described the project in September as “seemingly on hold” while that litigation proceeds. Separately, a survey by Utah State University's Community and Natural Resources Institute released Oct. 8 found that nearly 76% of roughly 900 Utah residents surveyed in August opposed or strongly opposed building more data centers in the state.
Mark Cuban has argued that data center fights are a proxy for hate toward AI and concentrated wealth rather than about the buildings. The Utah version comes down to two questions, and Barchart is not predicting answers to either: whether a federal judge agrees that no reasonable viewer took the May remarks as fact, and whether a state judge lets Box Elder County residents vote on the deal. Until then, the sketch has the bigger audience, and the filings have the numbers.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.