When Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a Mr. Wonderful, found that his Shark Tank-ian pitch to the people of Utah to put up a massive data center on their land received a collective, “I’m out” from the citizenry, he insisted that the protestations weren’t coming from true Utahans but rather from a Chinese influence campaign—and swore he had “guys” who could prove it. On Thursday, he admitted that his source for those claims was his vivid imagination.
“Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Katner are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party,” O’Leary wrote in a post on X Thursday.
— Kevin O’Leary aka Mr. Wonderful (@kevinolearytv) June 25, 2026
O’Leary’s backtracking comes after he claimed that several Utah-based groups, founded and operated by Utah-based activists, were actually getting their talking points and funding from China. During an appearance on Fox News, he claimed that he had experts who did a “deep dig into the IP addresses” of accounts criticizing his project and found “two cells inside of Utah” that were supposedly linked to China. He also alleged that there was a slush fund of “millions, hundreds of millions of dollars” made available to the opponents of his data center by foreign adversaries.
Now O’Leary is admitting what was pretty much obvious to anyone who listened to him or has paid any attention to the general reception of data centers across the country: he’s full of shit, and the opposition is legitimate. According to ABC4, Utah’s local ABC affiliate, O’Leary has also deleted past posts in which he claimed that anti-data center organizations were bought and paid for by China and other foreign actors.
The opposition to O’Leary’s planned Stratos Project may have simply become too loud to ignore. The project is expected to span two separate 20,000-acre sites in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley and Locomotive Valley, each hosting clusters of data centers. A recent poll conducted by Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics found that 60% of Utah voters now oppose the project, compared to just 26% who offer any support for it.
The backlash is also already coming for politicians involved in approving the project. Republican state senator Stuart Adams, the longest-serving president of the Senate in Utah history, lost a primary this week to challenger Stephanie Hollist, an outspoken opponent of the data center. It seems likely more people will lose their seats as a result of the project, based on public outcry. O’Leary must have decided it would be a bit too hard a sell to suggest that it was China rigging the vote, too.
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