Fox News issued an apology after Kevin O’Leary said during an appearance on the channel that opponents of his Utah data center were proxies for the Chinese government.
Several Fox News and Fox Business hosts, including Maria Bartiromo, read out rare on-air apologies after O’Leary made the comments on the network in late May.
Fox News host Johnny Joey Jones said in his weekend broadcast that there was “no evidence” that the groups referenced by O’Leary were funded by or working in coordination with the Chinese Communist Party.
“He made certain claims relating to the opponents of his project. Mr. O’Leary has now corrected the record,” Jones said, adding that “Fox News Media also apologizes for the error.”
FOX issues an apology: Kevin O’Leary appeared as a guest on the show and discussed the ongoing controversy surrounding his planned data center project in Utah and made claims relating to the opponents of his product.
Mr. O’Leary has now corrected the record and explained he has… pic.twitter.com/dh1Y89DPOt
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 28, 2026
O’Leary wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday that he had no evidence that the opponents he called out on Fox, which included the Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies, are working with China.
“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that?” O’Leary said on Fox in May.
“There’s only one: It’s China,” the “Shark Tank” host added, before proceeding to call out the data center dissidents by name.
Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan, political strategists for Elevate Strategies, told Business Insider at the time that the businessman’s comments were “crazy and outlandish.”
Taylor Knuth, a longtime political organizer who O’Leary mentioned by name, told Business Insider in a phone call Monday that his reaction to the businessman’s follow-up post was, “Oh, that’s nice.”
Knuth joked that getting an apology from Fox News was something that he could put on his résumé.
He said he was still confused about why he was named in O’Leary’s interviews. While he formerly served as executive director of the Alliance for a Better Utah, he said that he left the organization in early April, before the first public proposal for the Utah data center.
“I don’t watch ‘Shark Tank,'” Knuth said. “I think he knew more about me than I knew about him.”
Data center backlash
The apologies come as the “Stratos Project” campus developed by O’Leary Ventures in Utah has become a flash point in a wider debate over data centers.
Construction has boomed in recent years as the AI race has taken off, but concerns have been raised over the impact of new data centers on local water and electricity supplies.
Around 71% of Americans say they don’t want a data center built in their area, according to a recent Gallup poll, and some states are even considering legislation to ban new sites.
O’Leary’s Utah campus has faced fierce local opposition, with the self-described “Mr. Wonderful” agreeing earlier this month to cut the size of the 40,000-acre site in half after backlash from local politicians.
That has not stopped O’Leary from being one of the most prominent advocates of the data center buildout. In a June interview with Business Insider, he maintained that building more data centers was vital if the US were to retain its technological edge.
“We’re in a global competition, an economic competition, a military competition, and certainly a technological competition,” said O’Leary.
“We’ve got to keep our chops because we have led the world in this economy for 250 years,” he added.
