20260514 - Kevin O'Leary's giant Utah data centre: will it happen?

Hello, I'm David Gerard and this is Pivot to AI, coming to you daily. Today, let's build another gigantic water-guzzling data center with no customer signed up. We really need this one honest. Kevin O'Leary is a television rich business guy that's not quite a billionaire. He calls himself Mr. Wonderful. Everyone loves TV star rich guys, right? O'Leary saw the AI bubble pumping up and he thought, I want in. So last year, O'Leary found a space in Utah and he started buying up land and land rights. And he just got the county commissioners to approve his great plan. The people who live there, they hate it. The planned data center is supposed to use 9 gigawatts of power by itself. The whole state of Utah currently uses 4 gigawatts. The data center doesn't have a customer lined up. That's what did in the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus in Texas last month. and giant data centres don't have a great track record of getting finished in the past couple of years but we'll get to that one. Box Elder County where O'Leary wants to build this thing is all for the project. They voted it right through. The locals are not. So far there's been 2,500 comments against it. The locals are especially worried about the water use. Boxelda County is not in the desert, but everyone around the Great Salt Lake worries about water. The data centre wants to buy enough water rights for 20 households The developers claim this thing will use net zero water This is why they want to take water that would normally be topping up the Great Salt Lake and use it to cool a gas power plant for the site. O'Leary's not taking this protest lying down. He tweeted how he got his degree in environmental science, which he did, and how he doesn't need to run the data center on gas power. Quote, We can also put a percentage of the power generation through solar, wind and batteries, because the battery technology is 10 times more efficient than it was just five years ago. Unquote. Can is a great word, and batteries, that's all true. All the project filings, though, say they're going to use 100% gas power for this data centre, and they put the data centre there because a gas pipeline runs through there. O'Leary also claimed the protesters were paid to be there. I noted, you know, what's happening in Utah right now is we think over 90 percent of the protesters are actually not people that live in Utah or Box Elder County. They're being bussed in. But there are professional protesters that are paid by somebody. I don't know who. And of course, they use AI to generate the this. It's kind of funny about it. If you look at the social media around the Utah proposal, much of it's AI generated. The protesters were bussed in, they were paid, and they're AI. I'm thinking every accusation from a rich guy's a confession. Who's the customer for this massive data centre complex? Erleary doesn't have anyone signed up. Maybe the US military needs a huge data centre. The Utah State Military Installation Development Authority pushed the county to approve the O Data Center plan after a top Air Force official asked them to get onto the case because President Trump wanted hyperscale data centres The Military Installation Development Authority is giving O'Leary a massive tax break. So is Boxel to County. They're not getting a lot for this. The timeline. They want to start building this thing this year and have the first phase come online over the next three years. The full nine gigawatts is lined up for the early 2030s. But what if it doesn't happen? Ed Zitron put up a nice post on Tuesday. Where are all the data centers? he went digging and tracing records and as far as he can tell all the talk of gigawatts here and gigawatts there is just talk there's tens or even hundreds of gigawatts of data centers supposed to be in the pipeline but they don't seem to be getting built that's why anthropic just had to rent a data center from XAI, who don't seem to be using all their capacity for their own GROC AI. So one thing, nobody has built a one gigawatt data center yet, anywhere, ever. There's lots of claims that a multi-gigawatt scheme is operational, but operational always means just a tiny bit of it has been switched on so far. Software guys act like yelling and press releases gets you a new building and power plant tomorrow. But data centres turn out to be hard. There is no such thing as a rapid build out. The megawatt or tens of megawatt projects, if they happen, they take one to two years The hundreds of megawatt projects keep getting stuck in development hell Ed says to always add a year or two to any data center projection Quote, While there are absolutely data centers under construction, and some somewhere are actually being completed, the vast majority of projects I've found are either in a mysterious limbo state, or, in most cases, under construction, years after breaking ground. Unquote. Ed's post is a great piece, essential reading. Link in the show notes. Kevin O'Leary's data center has no customers. His three-year plan is certain to blow out. And then the AI bubble pops. When the bubble does pop, do we have a use for a gigawatt data center shell? Not really. Before AI, data centers were all about reducing their power draw. Power cost money. They were doing really well at it. So I echo Ed Zitron's prediction. O'Leary's data center is going to fall flat and embarrass his investors, at best. The only thing I haven't worked out yet is how O'Leary gets paid anyway, because he must think he's got a way to get paid anyway. Thanks for tuning in to Pivot2AI. Please do send this episode to your favorite data center hater. Hit like and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a nice podcast review. And don't forget to drop $5 into the Patreon link in the show notes. Pivot2AI runs on the support of you, our viewers, listeners, and readers. So if we brighten your day, please do sign up. Thank you all. I'll see you tomorrow, and bye for now.