{"id":225,"date":"2026-05-23T11:36:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T11:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=225"},"modified":"2026-05-23T11:36:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T11:36:59","slug":"dont-want-a-data-center-in-your-town-you-might-be-a-chinese-spy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=225","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Want a Data Center in Your Town? You Might Be a Chinese Spy."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Utah political consultant Gabi Finlayson was driving out of a canyon last week when she got the news that she had been accused of being a Chinese government operative.\u00a0<\/p>

Read more Locals Didn\u2019t Think Roundup Was Being Sprayed Near Lake Tahoe. So I Went to Find Out.<\/a><\/p>\n

She was driving to a speaking engagement in central Utah with her colleague, Jackie Morgan. When their car climbed out of the canyon and back into cell service, their phones were going off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cJackie and I each had like five text messages saying, you know, are you okay, did you see this, it\u2019s gonna get worse before it gets better, but just hang in there.\u201d They weren\u2019t sure what happened, Finlayson said, until someone sent them the video.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kevin O\u2019Leary, the Shark Tank billionaire investor trying to build a 40,000-acre data center campus in Finlayson and Morgan\u2019s home state, had gone on Fox News. His \u201cguys\u201d had done a \u201cdeep dig into the IP addresses,\u201d he said, and found \u201ctwo cells inside of Utah\u201d affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party: Finlayson and Morgan\u2019s group, Elevate Strategies, as well as the nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finlayson and Morgan call the claim an out-and-out lie motivated by their opposition to a controversial Utah data center. \u201cYou don\u2019t wake up in the morning often thinking, like, maybe I\u2019ll get accused of sedition today on Fox News by Kevin O\u2019Leary, but here we are,\u201d Finlayson told me. \u201cI\u2019d probably get paid a lot more if I was\u201d being paid by a foreign government, Elizabeth Huntchings, of Alliance for a Better Utah, told Fox News.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They spoke against the Stratos data center not because they\u2019re being paid to do so, Finlayson said, but because it seemed like something that had been \u201cvery much imposed upon people\u201d\u2014a massive construction project undertaken with very little public knowledge, that could increase Utah\u2019s net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, as one University of Utah professor estimates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To O\u2019Leary, though, red spooks are the only reasonable explanation. \u201cWho would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having the compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There\u2019s only one, it\u2019s China,\u201d O\u2019Leary told Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo earlier this month.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This narrative\u2014that hyperscale data centers like O\u2019Leary\u2019s in Utah must be built, as a matter of national security\u2014echoes a 2025 executive order by Donald Trump accelerating the federal permit process for data centers. And more and more data center investors are picking it up\u2014insisting that their projects must be built in order to out-compute China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,\u201d Trump wrote in his 2025 executive order. (The president has also invested millions of dollars in companies that build data center infrastructure.)\u00a0<\/p>

Read more Trump Has Finally Found a Small Enough Enemy<\/a><\/p>\n

But Finlayson and Morgan, in Utah, spend their working lives support local Democratic political campaigns\u2014often a long shot in a Republican supermajority state\u2014andrun a Substack on local news and politics. It\u2019s an affiliation that may not endear them to O\u2019Leary, who says he will provide proof, still to come, that his critics are foreign operatives; he has as yet not done so. His investment firm did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finlayson says she\u2019s part of a wave of real, unpaid outrage among Utahns. \u201cAlmost everyone in the entire state is so mad about this,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s obviously the folks that are concerned about the environmental impacts\u2014I mean, it\u2019s the largest proposed data center in the entire country\u2014but then also you have a lot of more conservative people that are ranchers and farmers, people that live in these rural areas, that don\u2019t want this infrastructure.\u201d The backlash against data center construction has been called the \u201cmost bipartisan issue since beer\u201d\u2014and in Utah, that shows.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the west, Finlayson said, \u201cwe kind of have this libertarian streak\u201d: her community does not take well to \u201cinvestors and rich people wanting to come in and just impose this thing on people without really significant community input.\u201d In effect, she said,\u00a0 \u201cthe government is telling you what to do, and they\u2019re not interested in having any feedback.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Utahns have given O\u2019Leary and the data center\u2019s other developers quite a lot of feedback. Hundreds showed up to protest at a Box Elder County commission meeting where the data center was approved earlier this month, and thousands of people filed formal protests against the data center\u2019s water rights applications.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s not clear that overturning the county commission\u2019s approval would stop the data center\u2019s construction\u2014it has already been approved by Utah\u2019s Military Installation Development Authority, a powerful state agency\u2014one Box Elder County group wants to put the project on the ballot for a voter referendum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caving to public pressure, the Utah legislature announced Wednesday that it will study the impacts of the proposed data center on the ever-shrinking Great Salt Lake\u2019s water\u2014a timely move, as Utah declared a statewide drought emergency this week. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has publicly acknowledged that the rollout of O\u2019Leary\u2019s Stratos data center \u201cwas not good.\u201d And more protests against the project are scheduled to descend on the Utah State Capitol during Memorial Day weekend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finlayson is heartened by the pushback. \u201cThis is not about where you fall in the political spectrum, it\u2019s about who has power to make decisions over your life and who doesn\u2019t,\u201d she said.\u00a0 \u201cOftentimes, it feels like we don\u2019t get to decide what happens to us, and we\u2019re just getting things imposed on us by the government or by the wealthy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Republican-supermajority Utah, she said, this kind of alliance-building means a great deal. \u201cI think that people that have had money and have had power for a long time forget what it looks like when real people have a real problem with a real issue, and they really push back.\u201d<\/p>

Read more Solar Electricity Is Poised to Overtake Coal in\u2014of All Places\u2014Texas<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TV\u2019s Mr. Wonderful accused two Utah women of being CCP agents. Their crime: opposing his super-sized data center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nDon\u2019t Want a Data Center in Your Town? You Might Be a Chinese Spy. - Moving and Mortgage Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=225\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Don\u2019t Want a Data Center in Your Town? 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