Kevin O’Leary and Fox Face Defamation Suit Over Utah Data Center China Claims

The lawsuit was filed less than three weeks after O’Leary’s clarification, The Verge reported. The plaintiffs are Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, and Joshua Kanter. O’Leary’s clarification also named Taylor Knuth.

The dispute traces to O’Leary’s May 11 appearance on Fox Business. Wearing a black baseball cap printed with “Utah National Security,” he told Maria Bartiromo that he was under attack by Chinese agents and that online criticism of Wonder Valley, his proposed data center, could only be explained by China. “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, according to The Verge. “There’s only one: It’s China.”

O’Leary said he had investigators dig into IP addresses and, brandishing a sheet of paper, read names of people who had criticized the project or whom he believed were connected to critics. He invited them to “come out, come out, wherever you are” and clear their names, saying, “It’s the CPP [sic] at work here. There’s no question about it.”

Six weeks later, Bartiromo ended a segment by displaying a note O’Leary had posted the previous day. In it, he said he had no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth, or Josh Kanter were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Bartiromo said Fox News Media was not aware of any evidence that they were funded or directed by China or the CCP. “Fox News Media apologizes for the error,” she said.

The Verge described the clarification as an abrupt shift. O’Leary had presented the project as nearly inevitable, backed by state leadership, approved unanimously by local officials, demanded by national security, and opposed only by sinister outside forces. The project, called Wonder Valley, after O’Leary’s Shark Tank nickname Mr. Wonderful, was to be built on 40,000 acres north of Great Salt Lake in rural Box Elder County, Utah. O’Leary had said it would be “the largest data center in the world,” with a dedicated gas power plant drawing from an interstate pipeline and generating 9 gigawatts of electricity, more than double the average consumption of the entire state.

O’Leary credited Utah’s governor and legislative leaders for the speed of the project and said it would show China and the rest of the world that the United States was not “messing around.” The three county commissioners approved the data center unanimously the week before his Fox Business appearance, according to The Verge.

But the commissioners were officially told the project was coming only five weeks before they were expected to vote, The Verge reported. Before that, they had heard only rumors. One commissioner, Lee Perry, was skeptical. In early March, he drove north out of Brigham City, past a bird refuge and a Northrop Grumman test range, through salt flats and pale grass, to a fork in the road where Tim Munns waited in his truck.

Munns had been texting and calling Perry and the other two commissioners for weeks, saying someone was talking to landowners about buying property for a data center near his ranch in Hansel Valley. Perry thought the rumors sounded farfetched, The Verge reported. There was no power, no water, and only a few roads, mostly gravel, lined with tires mounted on posts and spray-painted “keep out.” Hardly anyone lived there but Munns, who had bought his place 50 years earlier because no one else wanted it.

The Verge said it spoke with more than two dozen local officials, residents, and others involved with the project over five months. That reporting included interviews and thousands of pages of emails and text messages obtained through public records requests. Paul Palandjian, CEO and cofounder of O’Leary Digital, described himself as “an open kimono” of transparency, but after emailed questions and requests to speak with O’Leary, he responded with a message from a lawyer threatening legal action over any false statements.

The records and interviews, according to The Verge, showed a project that moved with the urgency of an emergency. Developers were racing other speculators, O’Leary was racing rival projects chasing the same few tenants, Utah was racing other states, and the United States was racing China, until the project ran into residents of Box Elder County whom the developers had neglected to tell.