Kevin O’Leary plays a great villain.
The famous investor spent decades honing his image as the least likable rich man on “Shark Tank,” reveling in what he called brutal honesty. Last year, he riffed on that persona in Marty Supreme, highlighted by a scene in which he hits Timothée Chalamet with a table tennis paddle.
So it’s no surprise that the man driving massive development in Utah has emerged as the hated face of AI data center backlash.
Stories about opposition to the O’Leary-backed 40,000-acre Stratos project hit national news outlets and social media last month. Tucker Carlson, known for his hot buttons, cast O’Leary on his show last week as the real-life Mr. Monopoly exploiting Utah taxpayers.
O’Leary is now claiming that those who don’t like his project are professional protesters and are being funded by the shadowy boogeyman.
But the details of O’Leary’s project and the people who hate it are beside the point. As recent Gallup polls show, opposition to data centers is a widespread bipartisan phenomenon across the United States.
The technocratic response to this backlash is to tell those who don’t like data centers that they’re wrong and that data centers aren’t actually wasting precious water or energy. (Business Insider published an award-winning series on these claims and counterclaims last year.)
But this feels like containment is broken. Data centers are convenient repositories for everyone’s fears and anxieties about AI. We need to consider not only what the AI does or does not do to the environment, but also what the AI does to the environment. allstarting with the future of our economy.
Again, that anxiety is completely understandable. That’s because everyone, including the leaders of the largest AI companies, predicts that AI will revolutionize the workforce.
We are also told that all of this is inevitable and that we don’t really have a say. You can’t hold back technology! And all we can do is hope we adapt. So opposing a data center project in your town seems like a pretty reasonable kind of protest vote. I may not be able to prevent AI from completely changing my life, but I can at least keep it out of my backyard.
So what if you’re a well-intentioned AI advocate who thinks the backlash is truly misplaced and that fighting data centers is as foolish as fighting freeways?
Analyst Ben Thompson suggests “let’s eliminate the backlash by writing checks to people in the data center area.”
If your data center is a resource for the future of AI, then start paying people for that resource. If the data center along this road resulted in a check in my mailbox every year, instead of being sold to my neighbors on some amorphous tax incentive that my local government may or may not spend appropriately, I wonder if more people would be able to use it.
Of course, the sober answer to this is that AI data centers already It aims to provide employment in the short term and stimulate all types of economic activity in the long term.
But it’s another thing to tell someone that the creepy building down the street is going to make the electrician a lot of money. It’s another thing to give everyone a check. And if Kevin O’Learys and other technocrats write checks, taking cash out of their pockets and putting it in yours, speaking in the present tense may make the alarming future of AI more manageable.