Kevin O'Leary talks election results, Stratos project timeline with KSL

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Kevin O'Leary seeks community support for his artificial intelligence data center in Utah.
He plans to employ 4,000 for construction and 2,000 for operations.
O'Leary aims to start within 12 months, pending permits and community buy-in.

SALT LAKE CITY — Celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary wants Utahns on his side as his massive artificial intelligence data center project planned for Box Elder County moves forward.

"I need Box Elder on my side and with me on it," he said during a remote interview with KSL. "This needs to be supported by the community eventually. It has to be."

O'Leary said he wants to change the narrative around the Stratos Project and correct misinformation.

"You deserve every right to scrutinize it, but I need to employ 4,000 people to build it and 2,000 people to work there. That's what I'm worried about," O'Leary said.

Utah Senate President Stuart Adams had a leading role in swiftly approving the Stratos agreement. Now, both Adams and two Box Elder County commissioners who also voted in favor of the project have lost their bids for reelection.

But O'Leary isn't convinced his project is to blame.

"Every politician has issues, and I don't know what makes them win or lose, but I do know what affects me is the policy," he said.

As he remains focused on how Utah policy will impact his project, O'Leary confirmed he has interested tenants for the data center but said he could not say much more due to NDAs.

He also said he hopes to break ground on the first phase within 12 months, but that timeline depends on securing key permits for water and construction.

In response to public pressure from Adams last month, O'Leary agreed to shrink the overall acreage of the project by 75%. The once-planned 40,000-acre project area will be a 10,000-acre campus, according to O'Leary Digital.

O'Leary said he believes building in phases will eventually lead to buy-in from Utahns.

"What I think is great about doing it in phases is that I think everybody can come and kick the tires on the first phase," O'Leary said. "I would like to be there at the ribbon-cutting when we open the first phase and say, 'OK, everybody, let's look at it at night for light. Let's put your ear to the wall for sound. Here are the actual metrics of the water it used in the last 24 hours. Here's the air that's being monitored.' And I think everybody's going to be pretty surprised."

As for his commitment to provide excess water to the Great Salt Lake, there are more questions than answers about how that would work.

"The problem is how to get it there," he said. "We'd work together to say, 'What level of treatment do you want before it's returned? And would the abutting ranchers allow us to put some kind of piping across their lands to get to the lake?' I'm assuming they would. I mean, we've got to ask them. We have to have a plan for it. But we're wide open."

KSL interviewed O'Leary for a special series of reports airing on KSL next week that will look beyond Box Elder County to search for information to inform decisions about data centers in Utah. 'Beyond Box Elder: The Bet on Data Centers' starts airing Monday night at 10 p.m. on KSL.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.