The battle over Kevin O’Leary’s proposed Stratos data center in Utah had already produced protests, petitions and litigation before it reached a much larger stage: Saturday Night Live.

The project was initially framed at a scale of roughly 40,000 acres, prompting residents to raise alarms about water demand, environmental consequences and the way the development was being advanced. Under sustained public pressure, O’Leary cut the proposed footprint to just over 20,000 acres—but critics did not take that as an answer to their broader objections.¹

O’Leary, through O’Leary Digital, has cast the resistance as an obstacle rather than a verdict on the project. In a June interview, he said: “There are bumps in the road. There’s litigation. There’s misinformation. There’s propaganda. You name it. But if you know what you’re doing is right, you make it, you get there.” His conclusion was succinct: “Persevere.”¹

The dispute sharpened after O’Leary suggested on Fox News that some opponents had ties to the Chinese Communist Party, a claim he later walked back. A Utah advocacy group that opposed Stratos subsequently sued O’Leary and Fox News for defamation.¹

Then came Weekend Update. James Austin Johnson’s O’Leary delivered the project’s critics’ nightmare in comic form: “All I want is to buy up 40,000 acres of God’s untouched splendor and replace it with a very loud computer that steals your job.”² The sketch capped a season in which SNL has increasingly treated AI’s most extravagant boosters as ready-made targets.²

That is the tension Stratos cannot escape. Supporters of data centers point to jobs, economic growth and the U.S. race for AI leadership. But in Utah, the question remains more immediate: who bears the environmental and civic cost of building that future?¹