In February, shortly after making his feature-film debut as a pen magnate in “Marty Supreme”, Kevin O’Leary announced that he would build one of the world’s biggest data-centre projects in Utah. What did Mr O’Leary, who is best known for presenting “Shark Tank”, know about data centres? One analyst dismissed the project as an example of “vapourware gigawatts”.
The market shrugged. How would it be paid for? Or powered?
Little information is available about a 1GW project in south Florida that was supposedly shelved in February, except that the land had been bought for $15m in 2024 by an obscure investment firm. Analysts at Bernstein, a broker, attempted to quantify the credibility of each watt of announced capacity. Another fantasist is Vermaland, a land bank that announced a gargantuan 3GW facility in Arizona last year, according to their model.
But beside them is a long line of property developers, private-capital firms, “neo-cloud” operators and crypto-miners, followed by international chancers, national rogues and local spivs. Imaginary scalps are easy to claim. Silicon Valley giants are the biggest backers of data centres. Most of their plans were destined to remain press releases. Plans by Google and Amazon are taken at their word. Those by CoreWeave and Nebius, two large neo-clouds, are discounted by around half. Mr O’Leary is ignored. In May the project was reportedly cut by four-fifths after facing local opposition—a shadow-boxing knockout. When a data-centre plan that would never have materialised is cut down, it often makes a very large sound.
Data centres are a nightmare of political economy . Voters see them as ugly, dirty, noisy and power-hungry bastions of arrogant Silicon Valley companies. And—thanks to ChatGPT—it has never been easier to pen a letter to the planning department saying so. Yet the public has an awful lot riding on these windowless sheds, for the the stock market is a one-way bet on them being built. Data centres are particularly disorientating for Democrats, since unions tend to support the projects. If artificial intelligence is a class war, it pits a coalition of billionaires and electricians against the office droids both despise.
