OUR DAILY THREAD: Shark Tanked
Data center of attention
THE SET-UP: What happens when it’s the shark that does the jumping?
We just got a pretty good idea from celebrity “Shark” Kevin O’Leary. He attempted to leapfrog over the objections of local Utahns who didn’t want to live with the consequences of his 40,000 acre mega-data center complex.
He didn’t stick the landing.
In fact, nearly a month after he announced his ambitious “Stratos Project” was headed to the northwestern corner of Utah, “Mr. Wonderful” agreed to a radically reduced version that cut the project’s size down to 20,000 acres. Of that, reported KSL TV, “around half would remain undeveloped and set aside as agricultural space or for wildlife, reducing the effective area facing development to 10,000 acres.”
Of course, the scaled-back version is not guaranteed to survive current or future court challenges. Regardless, O’Leary’s loss is likely to embolden what’s become a growing nationwide backlash against data centers. Per Fast Company:
In less than a year, opinions about data centers have quickly shifted. In a Heatmap survey last August, 24% of respondents said that they “strongly opposed” a data center being built near where they live. In Heatmap‘s latest survey in May of more than 4,000 voters, that number had jumped to 55%. In the last nine months, strong opposition more than doubled.
And:
In a Gallup poll in May, 71% of Americans said they would be opposed to a new AI data center being built in their area, with nearly half of them strongly opposed. (It’s worth noting that in a same survey, only 53% of respondents said that they would oppose a new nuclear power plant in their area.)
Eighteen percent of Americans would rather live near a nuclear plant?
Okay, then.
How about the reason why those datacenters are being built in the first place?
Only 26% of voters view AI positively and 46% view it negatively, according to a national survey of 1,000 voters in March by NBC. With a net favorability of minus 20, AI was less popular than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or President Trump. (Since that survey, Trump’s low approval ratings have gotten even worse, so it’s possible AI may now have an edge.) Younger voters, age 18-34, gave AI a lower favorability rating of minus 44.
I suspect the almost messianic vision of AI being evangelized by investors and CEOs is exacerbating the cynicism and skepticism that’s taken root, particularly among young Americans. There is growing gap between the super-hyped sales pitch and the harsh reality of AI disrupting an already uncertain job market in a K-Shaped economy.
It was a gap O’Leary fell into during when Tucker Carlson invited him to come make his case during the height of his data center controversy. When O’Leary predicted AI would produce an endless cascade of jobs we can’t yet conceive of … Carlson pressed O’Leary for specifics. When Carlson rattled-off a list of jobs AI is already eliminating, O’Leary pivoted to the growth opportunities from AI’s military applications and the looming threat of losing Taiwan. Carlson called-out O’Leary’s pivot away from jobs in the US to AI’s role in defending Taiwan. He then tried to bring it back to the original question. Here’s a lightly-condensed transcript of what followed:
TUCKER CARLSON: [T]he promise of AI and robotics is that the robots will make the products of the future. So how exactly does that result in American jobs? What are you talking about? Every job is replaced by a machine.
KEVIN O’LEARY: I don’t buy that. I just don’t agree with you because it’s never happened this way.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, then please make me feel better. Where are these millions of new jobs? What specifically are you talking about?
KEVIN O’LEARY: Well, you know, every time technology advances it creates new opportunities that were not foreseen prior, because you don’t know the direction of new tech. Think about if you and I, because we were actually around in the late 80s, contemplating what new jobs would be created by the internet. And look at what’s happened. It’s created millions of jobs and advanced all kinds of technologies and changed the way we live to the better.
Despite his rosy prediction of an AI-stoked future of spontaneous job creation for humans … O’Leary knows full well AI’s primary appeal for businesses and corporations is as the ultimate source of cheap, highly-productive labor. It’s rarely said, but if jobs are not lost, AI will not be successful. It’s a truth O’Leary admitted on FOX Business the same day his debate with Carlson was released:
“People are not giving enough credit to what’s going on on balance sheets and income statements based on the enhancement of AI.”
When you hear investors mention “balance sheets,” the column they are usually talking about is the cost of labor:
“I know jobs are being lost, but at my companies, wow, we are saving a ton of dough. Our earnings are going up.”
And that’s why just seven AI-related stocks—the so-called “Mag(nificent) Seven” stocks—have accounted for much of the growth in the market. The promise of a “revolution in productivity,” meaning exponentially more output (production) for far less cost (wages), is the return many expect from their investment.
In a very real sense, it is analogous to the outsourcing of the 1990s, when Walmart led the way in maximizing productivity by minimizing labor with … cheap, lightly regulated Chinese workers. But O’Leary didn’t or wouldn’t make that connection when he was talking to Carlson. Obviously, he recalibrated his FOX Business message for Carlson’s audience in an attempt to assuage their trepidation:
KEVIN O’LEARY: And I would say to you the same angst we had, the same narrative that was going on in 1992 about how the internet is going to wipe out the economy and it’s a bad thing and it’s dangerous. Of course people loathe change. That’s the nature of how it is.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think that the United States is a happier country than it was in 1992?
KEVIN O’LEARY: What does happy mean? What does that mean?
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know. How about the suicide rate or the addiction rate or the life expectancy?
KEVIN O’LEARY: Those are all absurd. Yes, I mean, look, there’s lots of social issues and there always has been. I would remind you though—
TUCKER CARLSON: But they’ve gotten worse at exactly the period in history that the internet was formed and then seemed to infuse every part of our lives. So if you were worried about the effect of the internet in 1992 on America, looking back from the vantage of 2026, you could say, “Yeah, I had good reason to be worried,” couldn’t you? Or am I imagining that?
KEVIN O’LEARY: You could say that it would have some effect on society, but let me remind you something, and I’m probably the right guy to make this comment because I spend a lot of time all around the world investing all around the world. I don’t care where you go, and I feel this way, and I’ve really learned this over the last 20 years. What is the number one export of America? It’s not energy, and it’s not technology. It’s actually the American dream.
O’Leary’s struggle to respond directly was underscored by his reflexive invocation of “the American Dream.” As far as O’Leary’s concerned, Shark Tank is what the Dream looks like today. After all, he explained to Carlson, it does allow “a researcher” with an “idea” to “walk away with $105 million in cash 36 months” after appearing on his show. “That’s the American dream and I’m an ambassador for it,” he added.
And he’s right.
That is the current state of the American Dream.
It’s an electronically-transferred, addictively-gamified, jackpot-seeking world that looks and feels like his reality show. Entrepreneurs can hit the jackpot in an instant if they can convince a superrich celebrity investor to place a speculative bet on their idea of a better mousetrap. O’Leary, whose net worth has grown by 1,900% over the last five years, promises to “blow up” the mousetrap “on social” until it attracts a large competitor or private equity. Eventually they sell the entrepreneur’s brainchild for big bucks … a.k.a. “the exit.”
But only a small fraction of America’s Dreamers ever get a chance to make their pitch on Shark Tank. Of those that do get the opportunity to “trot out” in front of him, “80% fail, but 20% make it.”
That’s a K-Shaped success rate.
Not coincidentally, the widely-accepted definition of the K-Shaped economy puts the top 20% on the upper arm and the other 80% on the lower leg.
Is this the K-Shape of things to come?
Alberta First Nation in court over massive proposed ‘Wonder Valley’ AI data centre
https://globalnews.ca/news/11895544/wonder-valley-sturgeon-lake-cree-nation-court/
Kevin O’Leary’s Huge Data Center in Canada Faces a Skeptical Public
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/kevin-o-leary-s-huge-data-center-in-canada-faces-a-skeptical-public
Kevin O’Leary admits he ‘screwed up’ initial rollout of Box Elder County data center
https://www.abc4.com/news/northern-utah/kevin-oleary-screwed-up-box-elder-county-data-center/
East Texas data center gets pushback from community
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/09/east-texas-data-center-gets-community-pushback/
Northwest Georgia residents push back against data centers in local meetings
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/jun/09/northwest-georgia-residents-push-back-against/
Data center proposal rejected in Edgerton, Kansas, following community pushback
https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/kansas/johnson-county/data-center-proposal-rejected-in-edgerton-kansas-following-community-pushback
Hundreds of Lowell Township residents pushback on Microsoft data center
https://wwmt.com/news/local/data-center-lowell-township-microsoft-opposition-i-96-cascade-road-proposal-rezoning-request-lowell-township-planning-commission-michigan
New Albany touts jobs, revenue as data center pushback grows
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2026/06/08/new-albany-ohio-data-center-construction-jobs-pushback-community/90423756007/
Data centers face pushback amid utility consumption in south metro Atlanta
https://www.wabe.org/data-centers-face-pushback-amid-utility-consumption-in-south-metro-atlanta/