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Kevin O'Leary didn't really account for the backlash.

I think that's fair to say.

O'Leary, of course, is the Canadian multi-millionaire and reality TV star who's behind didn't really account for the backlash. I think that's fair to say.

O'Leary, of course, is the Canadian multimillionaire and reality TV star who's behind the huge data center project in Boxilder County.

And when he first started talking about it, his pitch was pretty straightforward.

He said it would bring thousands of jobs and a massive new tax base.

And beyond that, he said it would put Utah on the

front line and the global competition with China over AI supremacy. But then the word got

out about the project and the response was intense. Now, part of this is about resources,

like how much water will this thing take. But then there's the scale of it, just the sheer

size of the project was alarming people, the amount of power it would require.

And then there's just the broader unease with what these AI systems are becoming.

But O'Leary is just making the same case as other tech leaders and state officials that

artificial intelligence

needs more data centers, not fewer, and bigger data centers. AI needs computing power. He's saying

this is inevitable. So O'Leary has spent the last few weeks defending his project in the public,

which is why he went on Tucker Carlson's podcast last

week. This week, we talked with the journalist Art Raymond about that. He's covering the data

center story for the Desiret News. I was probably as surprised as many people were that

O'Leary would even take the interview. Kevin O'Leary, thank you so much for doing this. But he did it. And Carlson went right at him. If you're that concerned about the Chinese, what percentage of the materials in the data center come from China? It becomes combative pretty quickly. I'm asking questions that I think are relevant to the country.

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