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SALT LAKE CITY — A couple of Utah women have unexpectedly found themselves at the heart of the national debate over a massive, proposed Box Elder County data center, after the investor behind the project earlier this week called their organization out, as well as one of the women by name.
Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan, who have posted about numerous different Utah news items under their Elevate Utah social accounts, began posting about the data center proposal as it increasingly drew attention in Utah and across the country.
“I mean, everybody was talking about this issue before we even started thinking about it,” Finlayson said during an interview Friday with KSL. “The way we go about deciding what to talk about online is through reading the local news.”
Finlayson, senior partner at Salt Lake City-based Elevate Strategies, said she was surprised then, when data center investor Kevin O’Leary went on national television and named her and others, accusing them of acting as “cells” or “proxies” for China.
“Why wouldn’t you want national defense in Utah, why wouldn’t you want compute power?” O’Leary questioned during an interview on Fox Business while calling out multiple groups. “Lastly, Elevate Strategies — also a cell operating inside of Utah. Gabi Finlayson — Gabi, what are you doing and who is paying you?”
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” O’Leary said during the interview, which he also shared on his Instagram profile. “Let’s audit your books and let’s show the people of Utah you actually care about them.”
Finlayson said being singled out during the interview was shocking.
“It was intimidating, you know—being doxed, in a way, on national television, being accused of being a foreign adversary agent,” Finlayson said.
Finlayson said she has been a political strategist on primarily democratic campaigns and causes since 2018, but she has never been a Chinese proxy.
“I never thought I would have to say this in my career, but no, we are absolutely not operatives for the Chinese government or any other government,” Finlayson said.
She also said the group was not influenced in any way to post about the data center.
“No one asked us to talk about this, no one pushed us to talk about it,” Finlayson said. “This was us caring about this issue, especially because of the huge implications, and I think it’s because it’s the largest proposed data center in the entire country.”
Finlayson fired back at O’Leary, saying he was the only “foreign operative involved in this conversation,” as a Canadian investor.
She admitted the group has since chosen to be “snarky.”
After O’Leary wore a “Utah National Security” hat on national television, Elevate Strategies created and marketed its own hat with the “Utah Nature Security” label.
The organization has continued to post about the topic, and Finlayson said she and the Elevate Strategies firm have received positive feedback from people across the country as well as in Canada.
“When people actually come together and they band together on an issue that they may care about from different perspectives or different reasons, but they have the same conclusion, then we really can make a big difference in this state,” Finlayson said. “I think that matters a lot, especially right now.”
Read more: Hundreds gather at Capitol to rally against Box Elder data center proposal
