Kevin O’Leary says he could have done a better job selling his plan for a hyperscale data center to the people of Utah.
In an interview with MS NOW, released on Thursday, the “Shark Tank” investor talked about how he and his team did not properly communicate plans for the Stratos data center project in Box Elder County with residents, and “really screwed this up.”
“I have no interest in causing an environmental disaster on my legacy,” he said. “That’s never going to happen. There’s zero probability that’s going to happen.”
O’Leary added that he and his team were planning to be more transparent, sharing plans for a one-gigawatt facility and what the heat, noise, and water impact of this facility would look like. Critics can extrapolate the impact of his fully built data center from those plans, he said.
The original plan for his data center was gargantuan — occupying a full 40,000 acres of land. This would require up to nine gigawatts of energy, O’Leary said in an April interview with The Wall Street Journal.
However, the plan drew strong criticism from residents in the region, environmental activists, and local lawmakers. Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams posted an open letter that he sent to O’Leary in June, calling for a 75% reduction in the proposed data center’s size.
Following the uproar, O’Leary pledged to reduce the size of the development and to offer greater transparency regarding the project’s construction.
He said in the MS NOW interview that he has a lot of work to do and apologized to the residents of Box Elder.
“If I’ve said anything that offends you, yes, I apologize. If I’ve done anything that you think has been unfair, I apologize. But I also, with that, would say I want you to lend an open ear to what I’m going to show you in the months ahead,” he said.
However, O’Leary has stood firm on his decision to build a data center in Utah, saying in the MS NOW interview that although some people may view him as a “bad shark,” he plans to become a “major contributor” to the local economy.
O’Leary has also been posting on social media about the data center and his plans for the area.
In a post on LinkedIn last week, the investor wrote: “Data center developers have to earn the trust of the communities where we build, and that starts with complete transparency.”
“That’s exactly what we intend to do in Box Elder. We have work to do to earn the community’s support, but the facts will be public, from water and power to jobs and tax revenue,” he wrote. “If you want to build in a community for decades, you have a responsibility to become an asset to it.”
As of the end of 2025, there were 1,416 data centers built or approved for construction in 45 US states and Washington, DC, according to Business Insider’s data center tracker.
Representatives for O’Leary’s venture capital firm, O’Leary Ventures, did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
