Mr. Wonderful Wants to Power the AI Boom
Kevin O'Leary, the blunt-talking Canadian investor best known from Dragons' Den and Shark Tank, has set his sights on becoming a major player in the global AI infrastructure race. His latest venture: a massive AI data centre in rural Utah that he says would mirror the jaw-dropping scope of his proposed $70-billion campus in northern Alberta.
But not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat.
What He's Proposing
O'Leary's Utah project is being positioned as essentially a carbon copy of his Alberta mega-project — a 7.5-gigawatt AI data centre campus that, if built, would rank among the largest computing infrastructure investments on the planet. The Alberta proposal alone has been pitched as a nation-defining project, one O'Leary claims could cement Canada's place at the centre of the global AI economy.
The Utah site would serve a similar purpose: providing the raw computing power that AI companies are scrambling to secure as demand for model training and inference skyrockets.
Locals Push Back
Despite the economic pitch, rural Utah residents haven't exactly been won over. Community members have raised pointed concerns about what a facility of this scale would mean for the local environment — particularly around water use, land impact, and energy consumption.
AI data centres are notoriously thirsty operations. They require enormous volumes of water for cooling systems, and in the arid American West, that's a flashpoint issue. Critics argue that importing a mega-scale data centre into a water-stressed region raises serious questions that glossy investment decks don't answer.
Opposition has been swift and vocal, signalling that O'Leary's path from press release to groundbreaking may be rockier than his pitches suggest.
The Canada Connection
While the Utah drama plays out, O'Leary's Alberta ambitions remain very much alive — and arguably more consequential for Canadians. His proposed northern Alberta campus has been framed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to attract AI investment to Canada at a time when the country is actively trying to position itself as an AI superpower.
The federal government has made AI a cornerstone of its tech strategy, and provinces like Alberta are hungry for the jobs and investment that large-scale data infrastructure would bring. If O'Leary can pull off even a fraction of what he's proposing, it would represent a significant shift in where global AI compute is built.
But the Utah experience offers a cautionary note: communities don't always share investors' enthusiasm, and the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure is becoming harder to hand-wave away.
The Bigger Picture
O'Leary's dual-market push — simultaneously pitching projects in both Canada and the U.S. — reflects a broader reality in the AI data centre space. Demand is outpacing supply, and investors are racing to lock up land, power access, and water rights before competitors do. Whether that frenzy translates into actual shovels in the ground, in Utah or Alberta, remains to be seen.
For now, Mr. Wonderful has a lot of convincing left to do.
Source: CBC News
