A Utah county commission triggered one of the most explosive local political confrontations in recent memory this week, voting to greenlight a colossal artificial intelligence data center backed by “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary — and the rage that followed has not stayed inside the meeting room.
Box Elder County, a rural stretch of northern Utah with a population of roughly 64,100, became the latest American community to fracture over the question of whether the promises attached to massive AI infrastructure projects outweigh their costs.
On Monday, commissioners advanced O’Leary’s proposed “hyperscale” data center campus over the furious objections of hundreds of residents who packed a fairgrounds facility in Tremonton.
The venue swapped out from the commission’s normal chambers specifically because officials expected an unusually large crowd.
They got one. Demonstrators filled the room, spilled into the hallways, and pushed out into the parking lot. Chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” echoed through the building as commissioners cast their votes. The confrontations with officials continued well after the meeting ended.
The anger did not dissipate overnight. Commissioner Lee Perry told ABC4 that law enforcement had been stationed outside commissioners’ homes in the days that followed.
“Today I have policemen parked in front of my house,” Perry said, adding that the demonstrations had crossed into something personal — protesters were “attacking, not just me personally, but my family.”
At the center of the storm sits a development unlike anything previously proposed in the state. The planned campus would stretch across roughly 60 square miles — a footprint nearly three times the size of Manhattan — and would run primarily on natural gas.
At full capacity, the facility would draw up to 9 gigawatts of electricity, a figure that exceeds twice Utah’s current total average statewide power consumption, according to state officials.
A physicist at Utah State University estimated that if the project reaches full buildout, it could push the state’s greenhouse gas emissions up by roughly 50%.
Kirk Offel, CEO of Overwatch Mission Critical, told The Post that the sheer scale of what is being proposed would have registered as fantasy just a few years ago.
“Nine gigawatts is aggressive. But it’s not unrealistic. Not anymore,” he said.
Offel described a fundamental shift in how the industry now thinks about what it is building. “We are no longer building data centers, we are building industrial infrastructure for intelligence,” he said.
Offel identified execution — not market demand — as the defining challenge facing developments of this magnitude, pointing to power acquisition, workforce development, and community relations as the variables most likely to determine success or failure.
On the environmental dimension, he did not shy away from the tension the Utah project has exposed. “Natural gas is being used as a bridge, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s available, scalable, and dispatchable right now,” he said.
He framed the broader conflict in structural terms: “We have demand moving at exponential speed, and policy, infrastructure, and environmental alignment moving at linear speed.”
Residents who opposed the project raised alarms over water consumption, air quality, drought vulnerability, and the permanent transformation of tens of thousands of acres of open land.
Many also directed criticism at the pace of the approval process itself, arguing that the public had been given little meaningful opportunity to influence a decision with generational consequences for their community.
State officials did not dispute the speed. Paul Morris, executive director of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, said last month the urgency was deliberate.
“It’s a competition,” Morris said. “That’s also why we’ve been rushing it so fast.” MIDA approved an energy tax rate of 0.5% for the project — a fraction of the 6% rate the authority had the power to impose.
O’Leary, for his part, dismissed the protests as largely artificial. In a video posted to social media this week, he claimed the demonstrations drew heavily from outside the region.
“We think over 90% of the protesters are actually not people that live in Utah or Box Elder County. They’re being bussed in,” O’Leary said.
Box Elder County is not alone in navigating this collision between AI industry ambitions and community resistance.
Last month in Festus, Missouri, voters responded to the approval of a $6 billion data center by removing from office several of the council members who had backed it, sending a signal that the political consequences of these decisions do not end on the night of the vote.
In Utah, that signal has apparently arrived early — delivered in chants, protest signs, and police cruisers parked at the ends of commissioners’ driveways.
