O'Leary Sued Again Over Claim That Utah Data Center Foes Worked for China
Taylor Knuth, an Ogden resident and former executive director of Alliance for a Better Utah, sued Kevin O'Leary and Fox News Network in U.S. District Court in Utah on Oct. 14. The complaint, docketed as No. 1:26-cv-00203, says O'Leary singled out Knuth by name on Fox's "Mornings with Maria" and other outlets as a proxy for the Chinese government working against O'Leary's data center project. Knuth says O'Leary never published actual evidence, never contacted him to verify the claim, and kept repeating it on television and social media. He seeks a permanent injunction against further disparaging statements, plus compensatory and punitive damages and fees.
At the center is the Stratos Project, O'Leary Digital's planned data center campus in Box Elder County south of U.S.-84. It was initially presented as a 40,000-acre development backed by the Utah Military Installation Development Authority and several developers, and later described as reduced to 20,000 acres while still moving forward. Developers have discussed up to 9.5 gigawatts of generating capacity to support the centers. An Oct. 15 water-right change application filed by O'Leary Digital Utah DC Sub I described 11 data center clusters and 7.5 gigawatts of gas generation, seeking to move a right allowing diversion of up to 1,712 acre-feet from irrigation at Bar H Ranch to commercial and industrial use.
According to the first lawsuit, filed July 15 by Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Joshua Kanter and Gabrielle Finlayson, O'Leary used a May 11 interview with Maria Bartiromo to claim a surge of online criticism showed Chinese interference. The suit says that across at least 10 separate media appearances reaching millions of viewers and millions more online, O'Leary called the plaintiffs agents of China engaged in criminal conduct, describing Kanter and Finlayson as "two cells inside of Utah" trying to undermine American artificial intelligence on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Knuth says people who knew him immediately linked the accusations to his former organization, forcing him to say publicly that he was not paid by Beijing. Bloomberg Law reported that Knuth left the Alliance in April and says he has had no involvement with it or with formal opposition since then.
The plaintiffs sent a correction demand to Fox on June 5. On June 25 O'Leary posted that he had no evidence that the Alliance, Elevate Strategies, Finlayson, Kanter or Knuth were funded by China or the Communist Party. Bartiromo read a similar statement the next day, and Fox says it aired corrections on the five programs that had hosted O'Leary on the issue. The new complaint says the retractions did nothing to repair the harm, leaving Knuth exposed to hatred, contempt and ridicule and unable to rebuild his network and relationships. Fox said Oct. 20 that it publicly corrected the record on every program where O'Leary's comments appeared and will vigorously defend the new case.
In late September, O'Leary and Fox moved to dismiss the July lawsuit with prejudice, arguing the remarks were argument and rhetorical hyperbole on opinion programming in the middle of an eight-week political fight, and that no reasonable viewer would take them as factual reports. O'Leary said he moved from an observed similarity to an inference he presented as argument, suggesting he subjectively believed it was true. The plaintiffs called themselves private individuals, a small business and a nonprofit singled out on national television and said they would oppose dismissal. With the Knuth case now added, the Stratos dispute faces parallel tracks: the federal defamation actions, a state-court challenge to the project approvals, and detailed water and power reviews.