Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary isn’t hunting for the small equity business in 2026. The TV personality has firmly turned toward what he sees as the ultimate commodity of the current tech revolution – the physical infrastructure required to keep it going.
When Geopolitics Meet Finance
O’Leary’s key domestic project is the Stratos Project in Box Elder County, Utah. Spanning 40,000 acres, the site is designed to reach 9 GW of power—a figure the Wall Street Journal put as “equal to more than 20% of all data-center capacity currently operating in the U.S.”
Yet to avoid straining the national grid, O’Leary proposes burning natural gas on-site via the Ruby pipeline. The first phase would target 3GW, at a cost of roughly $45 billion.
“I think we’re in a competition with the Chinese on economic superiority and military superiority,” he noted, reasoning that the motivation is as much geopolitical as it is financial.
North of the border in his native Canada, O’Leary is doubling down with a proposed $70-billion, 7.5-gigawatt AI data center campus in Alberta. However, despite being exempt from provincial environmental impact assessment, the project still faces numerous local permits, including approval from the First Nation.
“The minute we get the permit, that triggers a whole bunch of other activities in terms of how we finance it, when we start engineering, design, everything …
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