Kevin O’Leary, best known from Shark Tank, revealed a decisive shift in his investment strategy, moving away from speculative digital tokens and toward physical infrastructure.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos and in follow-up interviews, O’Leary said he now controls roughly 26,000 acres of land across North America, positioning himself at the center of the AI and crypto infrastructure buildout.
Why Infrastructure Beats Tokens
O’Leary argues that the next major source of value lies not in digital assets themselves, but in the utilities required to power them. According to him, land with secured access to electricity, water, and fiber has become more strategic than owning most cryptocurrencies.
His holdings include approximately 13,000 acres in Alberta, Canada, tied to his Wonder Valley project, and another 13,000 acres in undisclosed regions currently moving through the permitting process. Rather than building data centers himself, O’Leary is focused on making sites “shovel-ready” and leasing them to hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, or Tesla.
He emphasized that low-cost power is the real prize. Targeting electricity prices below six cents per kilowatt-hour, O’Leary said control over energy allows investors to pivot between Bitcoin mining and AI compute leasing, depending on which offers higher returns at any given time.
A Harsh View on the Crypto Market’s Cleanup
O’Leary did not hold back when discussing the broader cryptocurrency market. He warned that most digital tokens will never recover their previous highs and described the current phase as a necessary cleansing.
In his view, institutional capital is concentrated almost entirely in Bitcoin and Ethereum, which he claims account for more than 97% of crypto market volatility since inception. Thousands of smaller tokens, many of which are still down 60% to 90%, were dismissed as having no durable utility or institutional appeal.
While crypto ETFs have attracted strong retail inflows, O’Leary characterized them as insignificant in the context of institutional portfolios, arguing that serious capital prefers direct exposure to foundational assets rather than packaged products.
Why Many Data Centers May Never Be Built
Despite his own aggressive land acquisitions, O’Leary predicted that roughly half of the data center projects announced across the U.S. and Canada will never materialize. The bottleneck, he said, is not land but power.
Modern AI facilities can require as much as 1.4 gigawatts of electricity, and O’Leary believes many developers underestimate the difficulty of securing that level of grid capacity. He described the current rush as a land grab driven by hype, with little appreciation for the regulatory, energy, and infrastructure constraints involved.
Taken together, O’Leary’s message from Davos was clear: in the next phase of the AI and crypto cycle, ownership of energy and infrastructure may matter far more than ownership of tokens.
