Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, one of the state’s top Republican elected officials, said he is concerned about the potential environmental impact of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County.

Schultz, who owns land in the area, said in an interview Friday, “Personally, and for my ranch, this data center is not a good thing.”

In recent weeks, the House speaker said he’s been trying to get answers on the potential air quality and water impact of the data center plan, which is backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame.

Schultz said he spoke with O’Leary in April and asked questions about the project, but did not get satisfactory answers. Nobody, he said, has accurate information about what the impacts on northern Utah will be.

The plan for the data center was recently approved by the state’s Military Installation Development Authority and the Box Elder County commissioners.

A group of county residents is seeking to trigger a land use referendum to put the question of the project’s approval on the ballot for voters to consider.

Now, the House speaker is calling for studies into the air quality and water use impact of its installation.

“I want to see what those studies are before I can make a decision on this one way or the other,” the speaker said. “But as a rancher in the area, I feel like all the other ranchers in the area: I don’t love it.”

‘Access is very, very limited’

The Hooper Republican’s comments Friday are the most extensive the lawmaker has given on the data center and come after the speaker made headlines this week after a boutique Democratic consulting firm in Utah alleged Schultz could potentially profit from a parcel of land he owns near the project site.

Elevate Strategies, in a Substack post Thursday titled “The Call Is Coming From Inside The Statehouse,” said they’d discovered that Schultz owns 640 acres of land several miles from the proposed site of the Stratos data center.

The land is near the northernmost part of the area designated as part of the data center development, which Box Elder County said could be used for “manufacturing, retail, restaurants, hotels, and public works infrastructure.”

“Which is, coincidentally, exactly the kind of development a residential and commercial builder might know something about,” the Democratic consultants wrote, referring to Schultz’s work as a developer.

Schultz called the allegation that he might profit off developing the land in conjunction with the data center “nonsense.”

“Anybody that would look at this realistically and rationally could see that there’s nothing there,” he said. “First off, the property’s not even developable.”

The land, Schultz said, is part of his ranching operation, with “rolling hills and washes” that sometimes flood, making it impossible to develop.

Additionally, Schultz argued, Elevate Strategies saying the property is “about three miles” from the land approved for the data center is a misrepresentation. Driving, he said, it’s eight miles to the edge of the data center land and, he added, “There’s a freeway and a mountain range between [them].”

“When the roads get wet, you have to have four-wheel drive to get [to the land], because the roads get wet and muddy,” he said. “Its access is very, very limited.”

Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan of Elevate Strategies think the lawmaker should have publicly disclosed that he has property near the project site — as, they argue, Tremonton Republican Sen. Scott Sandall did to ABC earlier this month.

“He caught a bunch of heat for it, but at least he disclosed it,” Finlayson said of the state senator.

Morgan questioned why Schultz hadn’t spoken publicly about the northern Utah project sooner.

“Why hasn’t he been someone to speak up when the public had these questions?” she asked.

Both consultants were careful to note that they aren’t alleging that Schultz did anything illegal, nor that they have any evidence for the questions they’re floating about whether he might be able to profit from the land.

“We are not trying to make any sort of claim that any of this was nefarious,” Finlayson said. “All this is perfectly legal, and I think that’s in some ways part of the problem.”

Schultz, for his part, argued he has nothing to do with the project’s approval, and that he first heard rumors about the project in February, long after, he said, he committed to buy the land in Box Elder County in October of 2024.

And while O’Leary said last month that he met with Schultz, Senate President J. Stuart Adams and Gov. Spencer Cox to discuss the project earlier this year, Schultz said he was not present at the meeting — a claim backed up by emails obtained via a public records request from The Salt Lake Tribune.

In the emails from January 2026, a representative for O’Leary asks to meet with Schultz, while a representative for Schultz says the speaker is not available.

Schultz said Friday that he believes O’Leary saying the pair met was an “honest mistake.”

Democrats backed by China?

The public spat between the consultants and the Utah House speaker is just the latest in a weekslong online brouhaha over the data center.

In another post on social media earlier this month, Elevate Strategies alleged without evidence that members of Cox’s family may also profit from the development of the data center. The accusation stems from the Democratic consultants saying CentraCom — a telecommunication company founded and later sold by the Cox family, but where relatives of the Republican governor still hold senior positions — advertises its roles in data centers across the state.

But the company’s said they have nothing to do with the controversial hyperscale project in Box Elder County.

“We are not anywhere near that data center,” Chief Operating Officer Brad Welch told The Tribune. “We haven’t been contacted by them. We haven’t contacted them.”

And then, earlier this week, it was Elevate Strategies — which currently works for Democrats like congressional candidate Ben McAdams and Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill — that found itself at the center of allegations of secretly profiting in some way over the project.

And the internet spectacle surrounding the data center seemed to reach a peak as O’Leary went on Fox News and accused both Elevate Strategies and another Utah-based advocacy group, Alliance for a Better Utah, of being funded by the Chinese government.

“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? There’s only one. It’s China,” O’Leary said.

“Elevate Strategies, also a firm operating inside of Utah,” O’Leary added. “Gabi Finlayson. What are you doing and who’s paying you?”

Asked directly on Friday if they were funded by the Chinese government, both strategists laughed.

“Absolutely not,” Finlayson said.