If Kevin O’Leary, 71, has to do it all again at 25, he said he would focus on two key areas of the tech industry to succeed.
Shark Tank The star and chairman of O’Leary Ventures said in a video earlier this year that if he were in his 20s again, he would focus on the business that is most thriving right now: artificial intelligence.
“I think the growth of AI will be exponential,” he said.
But in the vast artificial intelligence industry, O’Leary said he will focus on either helping small businesses adopt artificial intelligence tools or developing data centers.
Instead of going straight to corporate giants, O’Leary said he will first try to narrow his focus to helping businesses with fewer than 500 employees adopt AI. These 36 million small businesses account for just under half of U.S. GDP, according to the Small Business Administration. And while they will likely want to use AI, they may not be as quick to adapt as large corporations.
This opens the door for start-ups to help businesses take better control of their data and set up systems to analyze it using AI, he said.
“There will be a huge number of people who want to use it but don’t know how and are willing to pay to solve the problem,” O’Leary said.
However, he was careful to differentiate between traditional consulting and labeled this opportunity as “implementation and execution.” O’Leary, an executive fellow at Harvard for the 2025-2026 academic year, previously said Luck he warns his MBA students against going into consulting, describing his career as a “slow descent into mediocrity.”
real estate AI
O’Leary’s second opportunity, data center development, may require more money and a little more effort, but it is no less rich in opportunity.
“The biggest challenge in artificial intelligence is the data center,” O’Leary said. “This is real estate development.”
He noted that today there is a mismatch between supply and demand in artificial intelligence infrastructure. There are currently only about 5 gigawatts of data center capacity under construction, but there is demand for much more.
“The demand is insatiable,” he said.
O’Leary, for his part, used his own real estate experience to create a data center development venture. He has already backed the creation of a giant $70 billion industrial data center park capable of providing 7.5 gigawatts of computing power in Alberta, Canada, although the project has faced criticism over delays in its implementation. In Utah, he also backed a $100 billion data center project that itself has come under scrutiny for potential impacts on local residents.
When it comes to data centers, data may be on O’Leary’s side. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that the growing use of artificial intelligence will cause data center power demand to skyrocket by 165% by the end of the decade.
Companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google have poured billions into data centers with no end in sight, and Lisa Schallet, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, said in a note last year that hyperscalers’ capital spending on data centers and related products is approaching $400 billion a year.
According to O’Leary, both AI opportunities have a key similarity: while they may not be the most sexy aspects of AI, both opportunities are about building the foundation needed for the future AI economy to function.
Although helping small businesses deploy artificial intelligence tools or securing land for a data center may not be such an exciting task. Shark Tank Both possibilities could make some 25-year-olds very rich, O’Leary said.
A version of this story originally appeared on Fortune.com on March 6, 2026..
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