Mark Cuban’s line landed as a joke, but it carried a thesis. Speaking on the All-In podcast, the Dallas Mavericks minority owner and Dallas Flash pickleball team co-owner predicted that as AI models and data centers become more efficient, much of today’s frantic buildout will look redundant, and that “a lot of data centers are going to be turned into pickleball courts.” Meanwhile, in northern Utah, that abstract skepticism now has a concrete case study: Kevin O’Leary’s roughly $100 billion Stratos Project has been forced into a real-world diet, and the fallout is still spreading.
Cuban’s Warning: Planning for Perfection
Cuban was careful to say he does not think the AI boom is another dot-com-style bubble, describing the scale as narrower and the potential fallout more contained. His worry is downstream: if efficiency gains outrun demand, the overbuild could still “destroy” venture capital funds, hedge funds, and private equity firms that have underwritten the boom. Big Tech, he argued, is borrowing heavily and committing to years of capital expenditure, a stance he called “planning for perfection.”
The macro backdrop makes his math harder to dismiss. The 10-year Treasury yield sits at 4.67% as of July 22, 2026, near its 12-month high. For projects with multi-year debt stacks, every basis point compounds.
The Stratos Project Meets Utah Politics
O’Leary’s venture in Box Elder County, north of the Great Salt Lake, was originally pitched as an AI campus spanning more than 40,000 acres with a power demand of roughly 9 gigawatts, promising about 2,000 permanent jobs and a Pentagon-linked national security angle. Box Elder County approved it in May 2026.
The state pushed back almost immediately. Utah Senate President Stuart Adams called for a 75% reduction in the footprint, and Governor Spencer Cox signed an executive order on May 29, 2026 requiring proper state evaluation of large data center proposals. O’Leary first called the demands “outrageous,” then reversed and agreed to shrink the site from roughly 40,000 acres to just over 20,000. He later conceded in an interview: “The two of us really screwed this up initially… We made huge mistakes… We pissed off a lot of people, and that’s not the way I do business.”
Water, the Lake, and a Lawsuit
The binding constraint was water. Utah’s Great Salt Lake has been shrinking for years, and residents were not eager to let a 9-gigawatt server farm draw from a stressed basin. Data center cooling is thirsty work: U.S. facilities consumed an estimated 66 billion liters of water in 2023, per the Department of Energy, with an indirect footprint from electricity generation of nearly 800 billion liters. O’Leary pledged industry-leading water technology and committed any excess supply to the lake itself.
The story is still live. On July 17, 2026, two Utah advocacy groups sued O’Leary and Fox News for defamation after he claimed, without evidence and later walked back, that opposition to the project was funded by the Chinese Communist Party.
What to Watch
Cuban’s pickleball court prediction may or may not age well. The rest of the sector is still leaning in: OpenAI announced a 3.2 gigawatt campus in Effingham County, Georgia, and Hut 8 (NASDAQ:HUT) secured a $9.8 billion lease for its Texas campus this week. But Stratos is what Cuban’s warning looks like when it meets zoning boards, governors, and a drying lake. The signal to watch next quarter is whether other mega-sites, in Texas, Georgia, and Wyoming, run into their own Stuart Adams before a shovel hits the dirt.
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