Don’t Want a Data Center in Your Town? You Might Be a Chinese Spy.

“I’d probably get paid a lot more if I was” spying for China, one of O’Leary’s targets replied.Mother Jones illustration; imageSPACE/Zuma

Utah political consultant Gabi Finlayson was driving out of a canyon last week when she got the news that she had been accused of being a Chinese government operative. 

She was driving to a speaking engagement in central Utah with her colleague, Jackie Morgan. When their car climbed out of the canyon and back into cell service, their phones were going off. 

“Jackie and I each had like five text messages saying, you know, are you okay, did you see this, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better, but just hang in there.” They weren’t sure what happened, Finlayson said, until someone sent them the video. 

Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank billionaire investor trying to build a 40,000-acre data center campus in Finlayson and Morgan’s home state, had gone on Fox News. His “guys” had done a “deep dig into the IP addresses,” he said, and found “two cells inside of Utah” affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party: Finlayson and Morgan’s group, Elevate Strategies, as well as the nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah. 

Finlayson and Morgan call the claim an out-and-out lie motivated by their opposition to a controversial Utah data center. “You don’t wake up in the morning often thinking, like, maybe I’ll get accused of sedition today on Fox News by Kevin O’Leary, but here we are,” Finlayson told me. “I’d probably get paid a lot more if I was” being paid by a foreign government, Elizabeth Huntchings, of Alliance for a Better Utah, told Fox News. 

They spoke against the Stratos data center not because they’re being paid to do so, Finlayson said, but because it seemed like something that had been “very much imposed upon people”—a massive construction project undertaken with very little public knowledge, that could increase Utah’s net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, as one University of Utah professor estimates. 

To O’Leary, though, red spooks are the only reasonable explanation. “Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having the compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one, it’s China,” O’Leary told Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo earlier this month. 

This narrative—that hyperscale data centers like O’Leary’s in Utah must be built, as a matter of national security—echoes a 2025 executive order by Donald Trump accelerating the federal permit process for data centers. And more and more data center investors are picking it up—insisting that their projects must be built in order to out-compute China. 

“It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” Trump wrote in his 2025 executive order. (The president has also invested millions of dollars in companies that build data center infrastructure.) 

But Finlayson and Morgan, in Utah, spend their working lives support local Democratic political campaigns—often a long shot in a Republican supermajority state—andrun a Substack on local news and politics. It’s an affiliation that may not endear them to O’Leary, who says he will provide proof, still to come, that his critics are foreign operatives; he has as yet not done so. His investment firm did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Finlayson says she’s part of a wave of real, unpaid outrage among Utahns. “Almost everyone in the entire state is so mad about this,” she said. “There’s obviously the folks that are concerned about the environmental impacts—I mean, it’s the largest proposed data center in the entire country—but then also you have a lot of more conservative people that are ranchers and farmers, people that live in these rural areas, that don’t want this infrastructure.” The backlash against data center construction has been called the “most bipartisan issue since beer”—and in Utah, that shows. 

In the west, Finlayson said, “we kind of have this libertarian streak”: her community does not take well to “investors and rich people wanting to come in and just impose this thing on people without really significant community input.” In effect, she said,  “the government is telling you what to do, and they’re not interested in having any feedback.” 

Utahns have given O’Leary and the data center’s other developers quite a lot of feedback. Hundreds showed up to protest at a Box Elder County commission meeting where the data center was approved earlier this month, and thousands of people filed formal protests against the data center’s water rights applications. 

While it’s not clear that overturning the county commission’s approval would stop the data center’s construction—it has already been approved by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a powerful state agency—one Box Elder County group wants to put the project on the ballot for a voter referendum. 

Caving to public pressure, the Utah legislature announced Wednesday that it will study the impacts of the proposed data center on the ever-shrinking Great Salt Lake’s water—a timely move, as Utah declared a statewide drought emergency this week. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has publicly acknowledged that the rollout of O’Leary’s Stratos data center “was not good.” And more protests against the project are scheduled to descend on the Utah State Capitol during Memorial Day weekend. 

Finlayson is heartened by the pushback. “This is not about where you fall in the political spectrum, it’s about who has power to make decisions over your life and who doesn’t,” she said.  “Oftentimes, it feels like we don’t get to decide what happens to us, and we’re just getting things imposed on us by the government or by the wealthy.” 

In Republican-supermajority Utah, she said, this kind of alliance-building means a great deal. “I think that people that have had money and have had power for a long time forget what it looks like when real people have a real problem with a real issue, and they really push back.”