The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary

On the morning of May 11th, the celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary appeared on Fox Business and announced that he was under attack by Chinese agents. 

For weeks, he had been going on TV and posting online to tout his project, called Wonder Valley, after his nickname from the reality show Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful. It was going to be enormous, “the largest data center in the world,” sitting on 40,000 acres north of Great Salt Lake in rural Box Elder County, Utah. A dedicated gas power plant would tap into an interstate pipeline and generate 9 gigawatts of electricity, more than double the average consumption of the entire state. The project was coming so fast, thanks to Utah’s governor and legislative leaders, O’Leary said, that “it shows China and the rest of the world we aren’t messing around.”

But now, wearing a black baseball cap printed with the words “Utah National Security,” he told Maria Bartiromo that he had noticed something baffling. Ever since the three county commissioners unanimously approved his data center the week before, O’Leary had observed a sudden increase in people mad at him online. For this he could see only one explanation. 

“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?” he asked Bartiromo. “There’s only one: It’s China.”

“I got my guys to go a deep dig into the IP addresses,” he told Bartiromo. Brandishing a sheet of paper, he began to read the names of people who had — or he believed to be somehow connected to people who had — criticized his data center online. 

“Come out, come out, wherever you are and let’s shine the light of transparency on what you’re doing,” he exclaimed, looking up from his paper to address the camera and inviting them to clear their names. “It’s the CPP [sic] at work here. There’s no question about it.”

Six weeks later, Bartiromo closed out a segment by pulling up a note O’Leary had posted the day before, white text on a black background: “Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Kanter are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party.” 

“How the heck would anybody think you could build something out here?”

Nor was Fox News Media aware of any evidence that they are funded or directed by China or the Chinese Communist Party, Bartiromo said. “Fox News Media apologizes for the error.” 

O’Leary’s “clarification” was an abrupt shift in tone. From the moment he announced the project he had proclaimed it as all but inevitable: blessed by state leadership, approved unanimously by local officials, demanded by national security, and opposed only by sinister outside forces. Now came a quiet retreat. Less than three weeks later, O’Leary and Fox were sued for defamation by Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, and Joshua Kanter. O’Leary and Fox moved to have the suit dismissed in late September.

Over the past five months, I spoke with more than two dozen local officials, residents, and others involved with the project, including the CEO and cofounder of O’Leary Digital, Paul Palandjian, who, after describing himself as “an open kimono” of transparency, responded to emailed questions and requests to speak with O’Leary with a message from a lawyer threatening legal action over any false statements. These interviews, along with thousands of pages of emails and text messages obtained through public records requests, show a project that moved with the urgency of an emergency. Everyone was racing — the developers against other speculators, O’Leary against rival projects chasing the same few tenants, Utah against other states, the United States against China — right up until they slammed into the residents of Box Elder County they had neglected to tell.

The very county commissioners whose unanimous approval O’Leary touted on Fox were officially told the project was coming only five weeks before they were expected to vote on it. Before then, all they had heard were rumors.

To Lee Perry, one of the three county commissioners, the rumors sounded farfetched. But in early March, he drove north out of Brigham City, Utah, past the bird refuge, past the Northrop Grumman test range, past miles of white salt flats and pale grass, to a fork in the road where Tim Munns waited in his truck. 

For weeks, Munns had been texting and calling Perry and the two other commissioners to say that someone was going around talking to landowners about buying property for a data center near his ranch in Hansel Valley.

Perry was skeptical. There was nothing out there: no power, no water, only a few roads, mostly gravel, lined with tires mounted on posts and spray-painted with “keep out.” Hardly anyone lived there but Munns. He had bought his place 50 years ago because no one else wanted it. All the good pasture was already locked away in generational farms whose heirs now lived elsewhere. Now he lived there with his son Bud and Bud’s family, and he appreciated the peace and quiet.

So Munns had not been pleased to hear the data center rumors, and he had not been happy to get the call himself from one of the developers several weeks ago. If you want to talk to me, it’ll be at my kitchen table with my sons, looking me straight in the eye, he recalls telling the man. At 4:30 the next morning, Munns drove to Salt Lake City to try to get some answers. But no one at the Rural Caucus Breakfast, where people from the Department of Natural Resources and other agencies met each Friday, seemed to know what he was talking about. He contacted his state senator, Scott Sandall, and Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz. Either they didn’t know anything or they weren’t telling him.

Perry told Munns that he hadn’t heard anything about a data center either. Neither had the other two county commissioners. Perry had known Munns a long time. When Perry was serving in the state legislature, Munns had spoken with him about stopping a landfill being built near his ranch. The battle had lasted years, but in the end the landfill was stopped. Now Munns wanted Perry’s help stopping the data center. The difference was that, unlike the landfill, it wasn’t clear there was anything to stop. No one had filed building permits, no one had spoken to the planning and zoning people. Perry had heard all manner of proposals for Hansel Valley over the years: solar farms, movie studios, amusement parks. They were typically presaged by phone calls and meetings. Most never became more than that.

“Everything is about speed right now. Everything.”

But Munns was convinced something big was coming. He believed one of the landowners in the valley had already signed documents. There were rumors that the state government was involved somehow, maybe the military too. Perry was preparing to run for reelection, and the people outside Brigham City always felt ignored, so it seemed worth the drive to appease him. 

The other two commissioners apparently felt similarly. They’ll be along shortly, Munns told Perry. He had asked them to come too. Then we can all hop in my truck and go see what the rumor mill is talking about, Munns said. 

As they drove over the ridge, Perry saw a vast expanse of sagebrush and alkaline pools, the white shimmering rim of the Great Salt Lake just visible on the horizon, if he squinted. 

“It was just kind of a desert,” Perry says. “How the heck would anybody think you could build something out here?”

A few days after Perry’s visit to the ranch, a resident asked him if he’d se

Source: www.theverge.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.