Did China Fund Anti-Data Center Protests in Utah?

Kevin O'Leary — Mr. Wonderful — starts with a name he didn't recognize: Alliance for a Better Utah. A nonprofit. Organized opposition. Running what looked like a serious, well-funded campaign against data center development in Utah.

His first thought wasn't political. It was financial.

This costs money. Real money. Who's writing the checks?

That's the question that started everything. And it's the right question. Coordinated PR campaigns don't run on volunteer energy. Someone is paying for the ads, the filings, the messaging. The question is always who — and why.

O'Leary didn't just speculate. He says he launched an audit — a trace of the money behind the campaign. The tool he used is public and boring and available to anyone: IRS Form 990s. These are the financial disclosure forms nonprofits file every year. Most people ignore them. They're dry. They're long. But they show you exactly where the money comes from.

If you know how to read them, they tell you everything.

He read them. And what he says he found was a funding trail running back to China — specifically to an organization he names as Alibaba. Millions of dollars, he claims, flowing in to fund anti-infrastructure PR in one American state.

He says he's going to publish the full findings. Whether that documentation holds up to scrutiny is the next question — but the method he's describing, 990 forensics, is a legitimate one. Journalists and watchdog groups use it all the time.

This isn't just about one protest group in one state. O'Leary's point is broader: the campaigns he's tracking aren't opposed to any single project. They're opposed to the category. Power generation. AI compute. Any kind of compute infrastructure.

Think about what that means. You don't fight power plants and data centers because you care about local zoning. You fight them if you want to slow down the country building them.

The data center backlash is real and has legitimate threads — noise, water use, grid load, land. Those are real concerns in real communities. But coordinated national campaigns with foreign money behind them are a different thing entirely. One is NIMBYism. The other is strategy.

O'Leary's answer to his own question — who would want to slow American AI infrastructure? — is blunt: only the Chinese.

That's a strong claim. But it's not an unreasonable one to examine. The compute war between the US and China is real. Export controls on chips. Restrictions on Nvidia sales. The race to build out GPU clusters and training capacity. Both governments understand that whoever builds the infrastructure wins the long game.

Slowing American data center buildout — through permits, community opposition, regulatory delay — is a low-cost way to close the gap without a single line of code.

Chinese influence operations in the US are documented. The question O'Leary is raising is whether that playbook has been applied specifically to AI and compute infrastructure. That's worth investigating seriously, not dismissing.

O'Leary says he's publishing the audit. That's the moment everything either holds together or doesn't. Claims like this live or die on the documentation.

If the 990 trail is real and the Alibaba connection is traceable, that's a FARA problem — the Foreign Agents Registration Act exists precisely for situations where foreign money funds domestic political activity without disclosure. That's a federal issue, not a local one.

If the documentation is thin or the connection is indirect, the story changes.

Either way, the underlying question doesn't go away. Nonprofit funding in America is opaque enough that foreign influence through third-party organizations is genuinely possible. The 990 is public. The audit is doable. Anyone can run it.

The right response isn't to assume O'Leary is right. It's to check.