Box Elder County’s commissioners approved Kevin O’Leary’s AI data centre project in northern Utah in May 2026, despite objections from hundreds of residents. Five months later the project reached a national audience by another route: a Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live, titled “Mr. Wonderful on Building an AI Data Center in Utah”, on the 10 October episode hosted by Shane Gillis.
The joke works because the fight is real, and it is not only a Utah fight.
The numbers behind the backlash
Start with power. A December 2024 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released by the US Department of Energy, found that data centres used about 4.4% of American electricity in 2023 and could take between 6.7% and 12% by 2028. The International Energy Agency projects that global data-centre electricity demand will more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with AI the main driver. Every gigawatt of new demand has to be met by new generation, new transmission or higher prices for someone else on the grid.
Then water. Many large sites use evaporative cooling, and in a state where the shrinking Great Salt Lake is a running political issue, that matters. O’Leary has publicly addressed the concern, saying his project will not drain the lake.
The third pressure is local trust. Supporters point to construction work, tax revenue and a county that gets a share of a national boom. Opponents point out that a finished data centre employs relatively few people for its size, and estimates of the Box Elder jobs shifted as the plan advanced. In June O’Leary reduced the project’s size after political backlash in the state. That is a significant concession for a developer who has spent the year arguing that the US must build data centres quickly to compete with China.
Badiyaa’s view: the economics of AI data centres are national, but the costs land locally. Power bills, water rights and land use are decided in county halls, and residents there are entitled to hard numbers rather than slogans about the future. Developers who publish water budgets, power-supply contracts and permanent-job commitments up front tend to face shorter fights.
The sketch: what works and what does not
Weekend Update’s desk pieces are built for exactly this kind of target: a recognisable television personality, one controversial project and a single line that can travel. The segment plays O’Leary’s pitch of inevitability back as something closer to a threat, which is the joke that has carried the clip.
Its strength is timing. Most viewers outside Utah had not heard of Box Elder County, and a short spoof did more to put local objections in front of a national audience than months of public meetings.
Its weakness is the format. A desk piece has no room for the trade-offs that make this argument hard, such as the tax base a rural county may genuinely want, or the fact that the project had already been scaled back by the time it aired. It also lets O’Leary’s persona stand in for an industry in which far bigger players, from hyperscale cloud companies to utilities, are making the same bets with less public scrutiny. Satire that treats one investor as the whole problem risks letting everyone else off.
O’Leary has hit back at the show. The more consequential response will come from Box Elder County, where the scaled-back project still has to move from approval to construction.
Further reading
- US Department of Energy: DOE releases new report evaluating increase in electricity demand from data centers
- Wikipedia: Kevin O’Leary
Image: Aaron Hall, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
