A vast new data center planned for rural Utah is being touted as a strategic weapon in Americas escalating artificial intelligence contest with China.
According to Fox News, Shark Tank investor and OLeary Ventures chairman Kevin OLeary announced Monday that the project will cover roughly 40,000 acres and is intended to provide the computing power to our AI companies that defend the country. It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we're not messing around, OLeary told Fox & Friends, framing the initiative as a direct challenge to Beijings technological ambitions.
OLeary said the facility could launch with about three gigawatts of power capacity, a scale aimed at ensuring U.S. firms are not outgunned by state-backed Chinese competitors. He stressed that the design confronts a key obstacle that has stalled similar projects nationwide: the burden they place on already stressed local power grids.
Most people dont like data centers for good reason, he acknowledged, noting that when they tap it to the grid and all of a sudden the electrical costs for their church and the community and the residents all go up, public resistance is inevitable. Not in this case, he said, arguing that the Utah complex will avoid punishing families, churches, and small businesses with higher utility bills.
Instead, the site will draw from a nearby natural gas pipeline to generate its own power, operating largely off-grid while potentially feeding surplus electricity back into the system. That's good for the community, but for the country, we need to compete with China. We need AI computing power, and so where do you put that? You put that in data centers, OLeary explained.
He added that the project could lure hyperscalersmajor technology firms that dominate cloud and AI infrastructureas well as potential government partners focused on national security. We need to lead in AI in perpetuity. Data centers are what we need, and we need them now, and Utah stepped up, OLeary said, casting the initiative as a market-driven answer to Chinas state-directed tech surge and a model for how American energy and innovation can work together without expanding federal control.
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