Kevin O’Leary says he won’t back down on his Stratos Project data center in Utah’s Box Elder County despite local resistance, a lawsuit, and new state requirements that force a smaller, phased start.
Kevin O’Leary didn’t walk away from the plan. He doubled down on it.
“ I don’t tap out. I don’t even know what that means. That’s never going to happen with me,” O’Leary told Business Insider. “Everything I do has challenges. Every deal, every project — it’s never easy.”
The challenge in this case is a mega data center proposal in Utah’s Box Elder County—called the Stratos Project. sometimes referred to as Wonder Valley—that has triggered organized opposition. crowding at planning meetings. petition circulation. and a lawsuit filed to stop it. Even before the state tightened the rules, local pushback had already become hard to ignore.
Utahns protesting the Stratos Project outside the Utah State Capitol in May. Natalie Behring/Getty Images
O’Leary, a prominent investor known for “Shark Tank,” says the resistance has only hardened his resolve. “There are bumps in the road. There’s litigation. There’s misinformation. There’s propaganda. You name it. But if you know what you’re doing is right, you make it, you get there,” O’Leary said. “Persevere.”.
At the center of the dispute is the scale. The Stratos Project was initially described as spanning 40,000 acres. When fully online. the plan estimated the campus could reach up to 9 gigawatts of power generation capacity—far larger than many comparable proposals. The proposal’s developers are O’Leary Digital and West GenCo LLC.
Critics argue the project is too big and too disruptive for the local environment. They have said the data center would have an adverse impact on local wildlife, water resources, and air quality. They have also criticized local officials and developers over what they characterize as a lack of transparency.
O’Leary rejects those concerns. Without providing evidence, he blamed a Chinese disinformation campaign for stoking anxiety. In his framing, the data center isn’t just a local development—it’s part of a global race in artificial intelligence between the United States and China.
“For me, all roads lead back to China,” O’Leary said.
He also insists the project will deliver jobs and economic growth. He argues that the technology underpinning data centers—such as cooling techniques—has advanced to the point that the environmental impact is negligible.
That argument has run into political pressure from Utah’s leadership. After details about the project drew attention, Gov. Spencer J. Cox and Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adam—who had initially supported the idea—issued new parameters in recent weeks that make it harder for O’Leary to carry out the original plan.
At the end of May, Cox signed an executive order establishing a “higher bar for data center development in Utah.” Adam then called for a 75% reduction in the project area and other commitments in a letter sent to Digital O’Leary this month.
O’Leary agreed to scale back the campus and comply with other requests.
Now the starting point is smaller. O’Leary told Business Insider that the project will build “1.4 gigawatts to start. ” describing it as a “sort of like a test kitchen.” He said the project was always planned to expand in phases. and argued that starting smaller allows developers to “prove out your model” and show “the new technology at work. ” which he said is “remarkably better than technology was in data centers 20 years ago.”.
Still, the political slowdown is not the only force shaping the outcome. Public sentiment toward fast construction is also a sticking point. A June Reuters and Ipsos poll found only 1 in 3 Americans approve of the “fast pace” of AI data center construction.
O’Leary believes that pace is necessary if the country is serious about leading the AI race.
“Ask yourself. can we build anything in America anymore. or is it always going to be someone telling us we can’t?” O’Leary said. “I think those times are over — well. they have to be — because we’re in a global competition. in an economic competition. in a military competition. and certainly a technological competition.”.
Taken together, the story is no longer just about one project in one county. It is about how big AI infrastructure plans collide with local concerns, state rule changes, and public patience—while the developer insists the path forward is already determined, even if it comes with roadblocks.
Kevin O'Leary Stratos Project Wonder Valley Utah data center Box Elder County O'Leary Digital West GenCo LLC Spencer J. Cox J. Stuart Adam executive order hyperscale data center AI infrastructure disinformation campaign Great Salt Lake