Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary wants to build a massive $100 billion data center in rural Utah. Residents are revolting

Local residents are revolting against a $100 billion Utah data center project backed by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary that would use more electricity than the entire state does in a year. Commissioners in Box Elder County—a rural county of just under 60,000 residents in the northwest corner of Utah—unanimously voted to advance the 9-gigawatt project last week, even as a crowd of people gathered at the county fairgrounds to protest and demand more information. Residents are concerned, among other things, about the facility’s 40,000-acre footprint—roughly the size of Washington, D.C. The meeting grew unruly and one commissioner told the audience to “grow up” before the elected officials went to a private room to approve the project while attendees watched on a livestream, CNN reported. A spokesperson for Box Elder County did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. A spokesperson for O’Leary did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Following the vote, a small group of residents filed an application seeking to put a referendum on the ballot to stop the project, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. The Box Elder County attorney is reviewing whether the application is viable. If so, the effort would still require more than 5,000 signatures from residents across the county to be put to a vote, the outlet reported. O’Leary, a Canadian businessman known for his role as an investor on Shark Tank, has argued the Utah project will create thousands of local jobs and that it is important for national security and America’s efforts to beat China in the AI race. He suggested in a Fox News interview that opposition to the project may be driven by online misinformation from China. “At the end of the day, who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one: it’s China,” O’Leary sai