Hayley Williams

Hayley Williams (born 1988 in Meridian, Mississippi) has fronted the Nashville-forged pop-punk band Paramore since 2004, steering it from Warped Tour breakout to Grammy-winning festival headliner. Her solo records — Petals for Armor (2020), Flowers for Vases (2021), and Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (2025) — made her a headliner in her own right, and she has never hesitated to use that stage politically, denouncing Donald Trump and Project 2025 from festival stages in 2024.

A giant “NO” over the billionaire’s face

The AI fight arrived in her orbit as land, water, and power. In 2026, Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary unveiled Stratos, a roughly 40,000-acre “hyperscale” AI data-center campus in Box Elder County, Utah — billed as the world’s largest, sited near the ecologically fragile Great Salt Lake — and residents mounted a referendum drive, water-rights objections, and Capitol protests against it.

Headlining the Kilby Block Party in Salt Lake City on May 17, 2026, Williams joined them. During “Disappearing Man” her screens filled with red text reading “NO” superimposed over photos of O’Leary; she wore an “ICE OUT” pin and told the crowd “Fuck ICE” and “Fuck Mr. Wonderful,” O’Leary’s TV nickname. The moment ricocheted across social media as a rare case of a headliner attacking AI infrastructure — not AI songs — from a festival stage.

O’Leary initially dismissed demands to shrink the project as “outrageous” and, per High Country News, waved off protesters as proxies for foreign interests. But within weeks he told NBC News the campus would be cut to roughly half its planned size after the political backlash — coverage that cited Williams’s callout by name. Williams has not published a broader manifesto on generative AI; her objection is concrete: what the AI build-out takes from the places it lands.