Political strategists Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan were driving out of a canyon in Utah earlier this week when their phones regained service and started blowing up. Text after text came through from people checking in on them and encouraging them to hang in there.
“We were like, ‘What is happening?'” Finlayson told Business Insider.
The Elevate Strategies cofounders were mentioned in a Fox Business segment during which “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary said some critics of his new data center project in the state have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that?” he said. “There’s only one: It’s China.”
“These are proxies for the Chinese government is my argument, and if they’re not — because I want them to be able to defend their names,” O’Leary said, calling Finlayson and others out by name, “come out, come out wherever you are.”
At first, Finlayson said the comments spooked them, but after watching the clip, they were more baffled than anything.
“This is so crazy and so outlandish. There’s no way that people are going to believe this,” Finlayson said of their initial reaction.
In a video posted to social media soon after, they disputed O’Leary’s comments and mocked him for wearing flip-flops with a suit on television.
Finlayson echoed the mocking tone when speaking to Business Insider on Friday, saying, “The only foreign operative here is a Canadian wealthy person trying to ruin our state.”
O’Leary did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In a statement to Business Insider, Paul Palandjian, CEO of O’Leary Ventures, said the company is not accusing a specific individual of being a foreign agent but is calling for greater transparency around the funding networks behind the opponents of the project.
“To be clear about Elevate: We accept that Elevate’s principals are American political strategists. We are not contesting that,” Palandjian said. “What we have asked, and continue to ask, is for full donor transparency from the organizations that are funding the opposition to this project.”
Data center backlash
Finlayson and Morgan cofounded Elevate Strategies, which runs Democratic campaigns, and Elevate Utah, a political content platform, where they’ve posted online in opposition to the Stratos Project, the data center O’Leary is backing in Box Elder County, Utah.
The multibillion-dollar, 40,000-acre AI data center was approved by county commissioners earlier this month.
Community members have voiced concerns about the data center’s impact on the local water supply, utility bills, and overall quality of life. Others have criticized the overall economic fallout from the technology.
O’Leary says the project will bring thousands of jobs to the community. He also said data-center technology has advanced to the point that it no longer requires nearly as much water as it did in the past. He’s proposed closed-loop systems — a method that would re-use a fixed amount of water for cooling — and air-cooled turbines.
Palandjian said in his statement that the local community’s concerns are “legitimate, and we take every one of them seriously.”
“Box Elder County residents who are asking hard questions about water, air, heat, jobs, and tax impact deserve direct answers backed by primary sources,” he said. “That is exactly what our public information site provides, and what our submissions to the Utah Division of Water Rights, Division of Air Quality, Division of Water Quality, Division of Drinking Water, and Division of Wildlife Resources will be subject to over the coming years.”
The issues Box Elder County locals have raised echo nationwide anxieties about data centers, which have become a lightning rod. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they don’t want a data center built where they live, according to a recent Gallup poll.
AI infrastructure projects have gained a reputation so unsavory that several prominent plans have been scrapped, and some states are attempting to ban future construction.
O’Leary has taken to social media and television to accuse data center critics of being “paid protesters” and of misunderstanding the projects’ effects on communities.
“I’m actually the only developer of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies, so I’m pretty aware of what these concerns are,” he said in a video posted on X.
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