Kevin O’Leary’s plan to drop a 7.5-gigawatt AI data centre campus into rural Utah is running straight into a wall of local opposition, according to Hacker News. The celebrity investor wants Box Elder County to host a near-copy of his proposed $70-billion Wonder Valley project in northern Alberta, and the county commission greenlit two enabling resolutions on May 4. Residents are now organizing a referendum to put the whole thing on the November ballot.
This matters because it’s one of the first major AI infrastructure fights where citizens are reaching for direct democracy to block a buildout. The scale here isn’t normal data centre scale. It’s something else entirely.
The numbers
- 7.5 gigawatts of compute on 10,000 to 13,000 acres
- 40,000-acre total development footprint on private vacant land
- 9 GW on-site natural gas power plant
- ~2,000 permanent jobs promised
- $70 billion matching price tag from the Alberta twin project
For context, the proposed campus would generate “more than double the amount of energy in the entire state,” according to Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies, quoted in the CBC report shared on Hacker News.
Why residents are pushing back
The site sits in a desert valley next to the Great Salt Lake, which has been hitting record-low water levels for years. Locals are already being told to ration water. The idea of a hyperscale AI campus arriving with its own gas plant and cooling load lands badly in that context.
Davies called the lake “an ecosystem that is already in a fairly advanced stage of collapse.” Resident Brenna Williams put the water math more bluntly: “We’re already being told to ration our water. But all of a sudden we have all this excess water to provide the heat generation for that much power and cool down the data centre?”
O’Leary Digital says the campus will use a closed-loop cooling system, on-site water only, plus heat-capture and reuse. No new draws from the basin, per the company fact sheet.
The political fight
Williams now leads the Box Elder Accountability Referendum. If county attorneys approve their application by month-end, the group has 45 days to gather just over 5,400 signatures to force a ballot question this November. Commissioner Tyler Vincent insists the May 4 vote “isn’t the end of the oversight process, but just the beginning.”
O’Leary’s pitch is national-security framed: “The country that has the best AI will have the best productivity, the best education, the best military ordnance, the best of everything.” He says construction could start by late next year if environmental assessments clear.
What stands out
The AI buildout has been pitched as a federal-scale productivity story, but the bill keeps landing on specific counties. Box Elder is the canary. If a referendum makes the ballot here, expect every gigawatt-class proposal in the U.S. to face the same playbook: water optics, gas-plant optics, and a signature drive.
Three things to watch:
- Whether the referendum qualifies for the November ballot
- Whether state environmental regs are actually built for a project at this scale (Davies says no)
- Whether O’Leary’s closed-loop cooling claims survive an independent water audit
The AI industry is about to learn that permitting risk isn’t just a federal story. It’s a county-by-county fight. More details at the original source.