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The massive data center and energy campus being planned for Box Elder County is one of those stories that's moving fast.

And just to bring you up to speed, this is a proposal that calls for a buildout of roughly 40,000

acres in Hansel Valley, that's north of the Great Salt Lake. And at full scale, it could require as much as nine

gigawatts of electricity. That's more power than Utah uses right now.

The project is being pushed forward with the help of the military installation development

authority, or MITA. And right from the beginning, it's triggered one of the largest grassroots

backlash campaigns we've seen in years. The guy behind the project is a Canadian businessman and reality TV personality named

Kevin O'Leary.

He's a well-known investor who's been pushing the idea of large-scale AI infrastructure.

And early on, he presented this Utah project as something that people would welcome.

But as the backlash built, he pushed back hard. He said the opposition was mostly outsiders. He even claimed some of the criticism came from AI bots, which is ironic. His last round of criticism came over the weekend. It was directed at a local political consulting firm called Elevate Strategies,

which has been pretty outspoken about this project.

And O'Leary targeted one of the firm's founders, Gabby, Gabby Finlinson.

We get asked to do some fun speaking engagements every once in a while,

and so we happen to be driving down to Price on Monday.

And we had just gotten through the canyon. So I got cell phone reception back on. And I had like

four text messages all of a sudden that were just like, oh my God, are you okay? Did you see this?

Like it's going to get worse before it gets better, but just hang in there.

My heart immediately sank.

Finally, someone actually sent us the link to a Instagram post by Kevin O'Leary.

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