Kevin O’Leary’s proposed 7.5-gigawatt Stratos data center in Utah—planned for 10,000 acres north of the Great Salt Lake—received an initial approval on May 4 by the Box Elder County Commission. The decision has triggered backlash tied to concerns over energy u
When the Box Elder County Commission approved Kevin O’Leary’s Stratos project on May 4. he expected the usual kind of resistance that comes with massive construction plans. Instead. his IT team flagged something unusual: a flood of direct messages landing on his X and Instagram accounts—messages opposing the project—coming in with a pattern that didn’t look organic.
O’Leary. a real estate investor and star of ABC’s Shark Tank. is behind the proposed Stratos data center: a 7.5-gigawatt facility planned for 10. 000 acres of cattle-grazing land north of the Great Salt Lake. near Snowville in Utah’s Box Elder County. He has argued it would dwarf existing AI infrastructure. potentially becoming the largest data center in the world if it ever gets built.
But in the Salt Lake City area, residents have pushed back sharply. Their concerns center on what a project of this scale could mean for the region’s energy use and its land footprint. And at the heart of the backlash is the fear that a facility so close to the Great Salt Lake could drain water from the lake.
O’Leary’s response has been firm. He and his company, O’Leary Digital, have brushed aside resource worries, saying the project would generate its own energy and would not use water from the Great Salt Lake. He points to reliance on closed-loop cooling systems.
He has also fought a separate dispute about the project’s size. The plan has been widely reported as covering 40,000 acres, but O’Leary says it is actually a 10,000-acre data center set on a 40,000-acre site.
“We’re not building a 40,000-acre data center. Nobody is. That’s ludicrous. We’re not taking water from the Great Salt Lake. We are not taking energy from the grid in Utah. That’s all fiction,” he says.
Even at 10,000 acres, O’Leary acknowledges the scale is extraordinary—about two-thirds the area of Manhattan.
Still, he says the project’s design is meant to look different from the typical data center landscape. Stratos has not yet been officially permitted for construction. but it was designed by the global architecture firm Gensler and is planned as 55 data center buildings in six phases over the course of a decade. O’Leary says each building would diverge from the usual warehouse look. with renderings showing angled glass facades. modern offices and front-of-house spaces. and long rectangular server floors broken up on their sides by stairways built into a window well.
The aesthetic he describes recalls another O’Leary project, Wonder Valley, a planned 7.5-gigawatt data center in Alberta, Canada, featuring a more sculpted building form and a large facade of windows.
“I don’t believe in gray boxes,” O’Leary says. “There’s no reason a data center has to be ugly. I don’t know where that law was written. I think they can be beautiful.”
Stratos could also expand far beyond servers. O’Leary says the project could eventually employ more than 2,000 people on site. He also describes an integrated energy and development footprint that would include natural gas power generation. a 3. 000-acre solar field. and a compact “mixed use innovation district.”.
And he frames the entire push as part of a global race. O’Leary argues that the competitive drive for AI dominance among hyperscalers—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—is pushing the world toward giant data centers like Stratos.
“They’re all going to be built like this because the economics are so brutal, you need scale,” he says.
Still, moving from approval to construction is not automatic. A vocal opposition has formed in Utah calling for the project to be halted. A referendum application has been filed to reverse the county commission’s May 4 approval.
O’Leary insists his case is also about more than local policy. He says the backlash isn’t what he describes as normal public pushback. The day of the commission vote. he says. his IT team alerted him to an “atypical” flood of direct messages into his accounts. His team found the messages were coming from similar IP addresses and that many of those IPs were linked to Alliance for a Better Utah. a progressive nonprofit focused on holding elected officials accountable. and a political strategy group called Elevate Strategies.
O’Leary says he then had his team audit Alliance for a Better Utah’s publicly accessible IRS 990 forms to see where it was getting its money. He adds that his investigation led him to filings “through multiple entities all over the world,” all going back to something called Arabella.
Until it was subsumed into another organization called Sunflower Services last year. Arabella Advisors was described by O’Leary as the leading dark money entity of the political left in the U.S. He further claims his investigation showed links between Arabella and various arms of the Chinese Communist Party.
But O’Leary’s story also contains a built-in contradiction—at least for those who want to read the political ties closely. The “thin links” between Alliance for a Better Utah and Arabella’s Chinese support mean some of O’Leary’s concerns seem overblown. Shortly after he began calling out these ties, Alliance for a Better Utah issued a statement refuting his accusations.
“It’s insulting to Utahns across the state to say that any opposition or protest to this data center is the work of a foreign government. ” the statement reads. “We are proud to live in a state where there are people who deeply care about transparency. their community. and their kids’ futures. It is not strange to us that Utahns want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come.”.
O’Leary says the project is moving ahead regardless. His firm will continue to seek the permits and reviews necessary to begin construction not only on Stratos but on other data centers in the future.
“There’s no question that this is the largest CapEx expenditure in history, but we are in a global competition for economic success,” he says. “Of course, we have to compete with the Chinese. They’re our primary adversary on this. And I’m beginning to learn how much of an adversary they are.”
Kevin O’Leary Stratos data center Box Elder County Commission Great Salt Lake O’Leary Digital Gensler closed-loop cooling Utah energy AI infrastructure Arabella Advisors Alliance for a Better Utah Elevate Strategies Sunflower Services Wonder Valley solar field natural gas power