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Entrepreneur and business personality Kevin O’Leary says the United States is at a disadvantage in the global quest for artificial intelligence dominance.
O’Leary, a regular on the ABC show “Shark Tank” known as “Mr. Wonderful,” took the stage Wednesday at the Indiana Convention Center as a morning keynote speaker at the Rally innovation conference. This is the third year for the conference that was launched by Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures in 2023.
During a fireside chat with Elevate CEO Christopher Day, O’Leary said the U.S. is not building data centers fast enough due to policy differences and difficulties in getting the massive facilities approved in cities and towns.
“This is complex stuff, but if we don’t do this, the Chinese are doing it. They don’t have a mayor. They’ve got one supreme leader, and he makes the rules for everybody,” O’Leary said. “He’s not screwing around, and there’s no kumbaya with the local mayor. He doesn’t have to worry about that stuff.”
Data centers have recently been a source of controversy across Indiana.
On Monday, tech giant Google announced it would withdraw its request to build a $1 billion data center in Franklin Township on the south side of Indianapolis following pushback from residents and members of the Indianapolis City-County Council.
Meta Platforms Inc., the parent of Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, is planning a 15-building data center campus in the LEAP Research and Innovation District in Lebanon. (LEAP stands for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace.)
O’Leary operates O’Leary Ventures, which is developing Wonder Valley, an off-grid AI data center park in Alberta, Canada. The complex will span 6,000 acres and have 7.5 gigawatts of power capacity (a gigawatt is equal to 1 billion watts). He said he also wanted to build a data center in upstate New York, but after receiving resistance, the project is now being constructed in Norway. He is also building a data center in Finland and three others in the United States.
“We don’t try to do things when we are not welcome, so we’ve got to get our policy together,” he said. “I was talking to the governor of this state saying, ‘Look, it’s all policy. There’s lots of guys like me that will invest the money and do it, but we’ve got to get path of least resistance.’”
To emphasize the need for more AI capabilities in the U.S., O’Leary pointed to how the U.S. Department of Defense “requires an unbelievable amount of computer power” and that “the country with the best AI” is going to win future wars.
“This is a race,” O’Leary said. “And I think the current administration is starting to watch from satellites how many of these data centers are being built [in other countries]. Langley [the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters] and everybody else is saying, ‘Damn, how are we going to catch up here?’ This is a big problem.”
During his wide-ranging discussion with Day, O’Leary also discussed his journey from growing up in a working-class family to becoming a successful entrepreneur, the value of creating jobs and the significance of customer service in building brands, the geopolitical influence of tariffs and advice on maintaining focus to stay productive and innovative.
The first day of the Rally conference has a national television audience on Fox Business Network, thanks to a partnership between Elevate Ventures and Indianapolis-based marketing, strategy and investment firm Prolific.
Rally, which drew about 3,000 domestic and international attendees in each of its first two years, aims to advance the state’s innovation economy by bringing together innovators, investors, business leaders, academics and thought leaders from Indiana and beyond and from a variety of industry sectors.
This year’s event is being held Wednesday and Thursday at the Indiana Convention Center.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct a reference to Langley, noting that Langley, Virginia, is the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
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“This is a race,” O’Leary said. “And I think the current administration is starting to watch from satellites how many of these data centers are being built [in other countries]. Langley [Air Force Base] and everybody else is saying, ‘Damn, how are we going to catch up here?’ This is a big problem.”
More likely he meant Langley [Central Intelligence HQ]
O’Leary is a nut in general, so his take doesn’t shock me.
The countries that invest the most money into “AI” are going to be the countries that get the most screwed. Models trained through expensive & exploitative brute force will be used by others to trained distilled models, which are even better and require exponentially fewer resources to develop.
The CIA should probably be keeping tabs on the models trained by foreign adversaries such that we can train distilled models stateside, but that’s it. We have to stop giving datacenter subsidies & we need datacenter operators pay for the infrastructure that they require. This does nothing but delay the inevitable bubble burst.
And the reality of the situation at present is that we have been training models in very brute force, resource intensive ways that China has used to develop their own distilled models that are better than ours. They are getting much more for much less. Let’s flip that script & stop screwing over ratepayers in the process.
Mr. O’Leary doesn’t care or won’t talk about this “race” to build data centers, and the environmental damage left in the wake.