Kevin O’Leary’s plan to build what was billed as the world’s largest data center in Utah collapsed after local residents learned of the project and organized against it. The proposal, a 40,000-acre AI campus called Stratos, was also known as Wonder Valley, a nod to O’Leary’s nickname on Shark Tank. It was designed to draw nine gigawatts of power, more than double the average electricity usage of the entire state of Utah. According to The Verge features writer Josh Dzieza, who spent months investigating the project, the way it was planned, announced and approved created a political firestorm severe enough to halt it.
Most Utah residents first heard about the development in late April, when O’Leary publicly described the massive data center. Before that, only a small group of people knew anything was happening, including a handful of property owners in the remote valley, officials at one state agency and a few real estate developers. The project advanced through the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, a state development agency that handles projects with a military purpose and holds broad power to override local land use. Once MIDA establishes a project area, it effectively becomes the municipal government there, a structure that can speed up permitting, zoning and other regulatory approvals.
For MIDA to create a project area, its board must ratify the plan, all landowners in the area must consent, and the county must also agree. By the time O’Leary was discussing the data center publicly on Fox News in late April, MIDA had approved it but the county had not, and county officials had only learned of the plan about a month earlier. Dzieza said the project drew comparisons to Foxconn’s planned LCD factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, which was announced with promises of 13,000 jobs that never materialized. That land is now being used for a Microsoft data center. Unlike that project, Dzieza noted, the data center buildout is real and can make sense in many cases, though he found more parallels than expected, including local planning meetings, angry residents and speculative projects that are difficult to verify.
The backlash extended beyond local opposition. O’Leary referred to his critics as Chinese spies on Fox News, prompting a defamation lawsuit, and the network apologized on the air. Dzieza’s reporting portrays the episode as a case study in the AI industry’s infrastructure boom and the bipartisan resistance to it, as well as the tech industry’s collision with local democracy. The Verge published the interview with Dzieza as part of its months-long investigation into the Stratos data center and how Utah residents fought back against it.
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