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 set of priorities. Their concerns centered on water, air quality, noise, and what a project of this size would do to the land around it.

The pushback took concrete form. Opponents launched petitions and filed lawsuits aimed at forcing a referendum on the project.

Then came the Fox Business appearance. O’Leary attributed the opposition to Chinese agents, a claim that landed about as well as you would expect with neighbors who had simply shown up to public meetings.

He later retracted the statement. Fox walked back the assertions as well.

The retraction did not end things. In July 2026, Joshua Kanter of Alliance for a Better Utah and Gabrielle Finlayson of Elevate Strategies filed a defamation suit against O’Leary and Fox News.

Motions to dismiss that case were filed in September 2026.

The ballot box weighed in

Utah voters delivered their own verdict in the June 23, 2026 primaries. Key supporters of the project lost.

That list included two Box Elder County commissioners. It also included Senate President Stuart Adams, one of the most powerful figures in Utah’s legislature.

Utah’s governor responded with an executive order setting stricter rules for future data center projects.

O’Leary also downsized. The footprint reportedly shrank to about 20,000 acres, roughly half the original plan.

The power target fell further, to approximately 1 GW.

The Wonder Valley brand is not limited to Utah. O’Leary Digital uses the same name for a parallel project in Alberta, Canada.