Kevin O’Leary faces backlash over Utah’s Wonder Valley data center project

On May 11th, Kevin O’Leary went on Fox Business with a dramatic explanation for why his Utah data center project was getting pushback. Chinese agents, he said, were coming after him. The opposition turned out to be a lot closer to home. Months later, the project has been scaled back, several of its political allies have lost their primaries, and O’Leary is facing a defamation lawsuit over that very TV appearance. A very big pitch for a very big desert The project is called Wonder Valley, a nod to O’Leary’s “Mr. Wonderful” persona from Shark Tank. Officially, it runs through his firm O’Leary Digital under the name the Stratos Project. The original plan covered roughly 40,000 acres in rural Box Elder County, north of the Great Salt Lake. Power was the real headline. A dedicated natural gas plant would draw from an interstate pipeline and generate 9 gigawatts of electricity. For scale, that is more than double what the entire state of Utah uses on average. The site picked up a Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) classification in April 2026. That designation helped give the project its fast-track feel. Locals were not sold Residents of Box Elder County had a different s...