The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary

In the remote Utah desert, the world’s largest data center project is being fast-tracked in secret, avoiding the scrutiny of the people who live there.

Kevin O’Leary, famously known as “Mr. Wonderful” from Shark Tank, was brought in to hype the 40,000-acre development, which he named “Wonder Valley” after himself.

But O’Leary’s attention-seeking has only popularized and energized the backlash among Utahns who want nothing to do with data centers — and they’re fighting back.

Mr. Wonderful wanted to build the world’s largest data center. The neighbors had other ideas.

OnOnthe morning of May 11th, the celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary appeared on Fox Business and announced that he was under attack by Chinese agents.

For weeks, he had been going on TV and posting online to tout his project, called Wonder Valley, after his nickname from the reality showShark Tank, Mr. Wonderful. It was going to be enormous, “the largest data center in the world,” sitting on 40,000 acres north of Great Salt Lake in rural Box Elder County, Utah. A dedicated gas power plant would tap into an interstate pipeline and generate 9 gigawatts of electricity, more than double the ave…

But now, wearing a black baseball cap printed with the words “Utah National Security,” he told Maria Bartiromo that he had noticed something baffling. Ever since the three county commissioners unanimously approved his data center the week before, O’Leary had observed a sudden increase in people mad at him online. For this he could see only one explanation.

“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that?” he asked Bartiromo. “There’s only one: It’s China.”

“I got my guys to go a deep dig into the IP addresses,” he told Bartiromo. Brandishing a sheet of paper, he began to read the names of people who had — or he believed to be somehow connected to people who had — criticized his data center online.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are and let’s shine the light of transparency on what you’re doing,” he exclaimed, looking up from his paper to address the camera and inviting them to clear their names. “It’s the CPP [sic] at work here. There’s no question about it.”

Six weeks later, Bartiromo closed out a segment by pulling up a note O’Leary had posted the day before, white text on a black background: “Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Kanter are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party.”

Nor was Fox News Media aware of any evidence that they are funded or directed by China or the Chinese Communist Party, Bartiromo said. “Fox News Media apologizes for the error.”

O’Leary’s “clarification” was an abrupt shift in tone. From the moment he announced the project he had proclaimed it as all but inevitable: blessed by state leadership, approved unanimously by local officials, demanded by national security, and opposed only by sinister outside forces. Now came a quiet retreat. Less than three weeks later, O’Leary and Fox were sued for defamation by Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabriel…

Over the past five months, I spoke with more than two dozen local officials, residents, and others involved with the project, including the CEO and cofounder of O’Leary Digital, Paul Palandjian, who, after describing himself as “an open kimono” of transparency, responded to emailed questions and requests to speak with O’Leary with a message from a lawyer threatening legal action over any false statements. These interviews, along with thou…

The very county commissioners whose unanimous approval O’Leary touted on Fox were officially told the project was coming only five weeks before they were expected to vote on it. Before then, all they had heard were rumors.

To Lee Perry, one of the three county commissioners, the rumors sounded farfetched. But in early March, he drove north out of Brigham City, Utah, past the bird refuge, past the Northrop Grumman test range, past miles of white salt flats and pale grass, to a fork in the road where Tim Munns waited in his truck.

For weeks, Munns had been texting and calling Perry and the two other commissioners to say that someone was going around talking to landowners about buying property for a data center near his ranch in Hansel Valley.

Perry was skeptical. There was nothing out there: no power, no water, only a few roads, mostly gravel, lined with tires mounted on posts and spray-painted with “keep out.” Hardly anyone lived there but Munns. He had bought his place 50 years ago because no one else wanted it. All the good pasture was already locked away in generational farms whose heirs now lived elsewhere. Now he lived there with his son Bud and Bud’s family, and he apprec…

So Munns had not been pleased to hear the data center rumors, and he had not been happy to get the call himself from one of the developers several weeks ago.If you want to talk to me, it’ll be at my kitchen table with my sons, looking me straight in the eye, he recalls telling the man. At 4:30 the next morning, Munns drove to Salt Lake City to try to get some answers. But no one at the Rural Caucus Breakfast, where people from the Department of…

Perry told Munns that he hadn’t heard anything about a data center either. Neither had the other two county commissioners. Perry had known Munns a long time. When Perry was serving in the state legislature, Munns had spoken with him about stopping a landfill being built near his ranch. The battle had lasted years, but in the end the landfill was stopped. Now Munns wanted Perry’s help stopping the data center. The difference was that, unlike t…

But Munns was convinced something big was coming. He believed one of the landowners in the valley had already signed documents. There were rumors that the state government was involved somehow, maybe the military too. Perry was preparing to run for reelection, and the people outside Brigham City always felt ignored, so it seemed worth the drive to appease him.

The other two commissioners apparently felt similarly. They’ll be along shortly, Munns told Perry. He had asked them to come too. Then we can all hop in my truck and go see what the rumor mill is talking about, Munns said.

As they drove over the ridge, Perry saw a vast expanse of sagebrush and alkaline pools, the white shimmering rim of the Great Salt Lake just visible on the horizon, if he squinted.

“It was just kind of a desert,” Perry says. “How the heck would anybody think you could build something out here?”

A few days after Perry’s visit to the ranch, a resident asked him if he’d seen a strange announcement. It was a post onPR Newswirefrom a few weeks earlier saying that a “large-scale powered compute campus” was planned for “the Golden Spike District of Box Elder County, Utah,” referring to the stretch of land south of Munns’ ranch where the two ends of the first transcontinental railroad were joined in 1869. The campus was a joint ve…

“We recognize the leadership demonstrated by Governor Spencer J. Cox, Senate President J. Stuart Adams, and Utah’s federal delegation,” O’Leary wrote in the announcement. “Projects of this magnitude require disciplined execution and close collaboration with state and local leadership.”

For Perry, the document raised more questions than it answered. Such as: What local leadership? No one had spoken to him or his fellow commissioners. And also: theShark Tankguy?

This year,Goldman Sachsestimates that $580 billion will be invested in AI infrastructure in the United States, much of it tied to the enormous data centers being built by Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and others. Superlatives have fallen by the wayside. This is more than federal, state, and local governments areon pace to spendthis year building public infrastructure, nearly twice what the US spentgoing to the Moon, adjusted for inflat…

Data centers have existed for decades, but those of the AI boom are orders of magnitude larger than the boxy structures built to store our emails and videos. In 2019, a notably large data center might have been the size of an Ikea and consumed as much electricity as 50,000 US homes; it would probably have been located near others of its kind, clustered near electricity and fiber connections in a place like“Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County…

While size is important, speed is paramount. “Everything is about speed right now,” said Reyk Knuhtsen, an analyst at the consulting firm SemiAnalysis. “Everything.”

AI, as every executive says, is a race. Like all arms races, this one is driven more by fear than hope. OpenAI’s founders were afraid that some less responsible company might build powerful AI and that it might, per a famous thought experiment, do something like consume all the resources humanity required to survive in the single-minded pursuit of a poorly defined goal. After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, it was fear that OpenAI might build …

“If we end up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars, I think that that is going to be very unfortunate, obviously, but what I’d say is, I actually think the risk is higher on the other side, if you build too slowly,”Zuckerberg said last September. This year the company cut construction time by putting billions of dollars’ worth of serversinside tents.

Lately, this corporate arms race has become an actual arms race, with executives and government officials invoking the urgency of staying ahead of China, which hadapproximately half the compute capacity of Microsoft aloneat the end of last year, according to Epoch AI, but is building more. Citing national security, the Trump administration hascut environmental regulations, promised to fast-track permitting, and moved to end the requirement that t…

Because the most profitable companies in history will pay more for a gigawatt of compute tomorrow than a gigawatt of compute next year, there is money to be made in getting them what they need as fast as possible. Even before the boom, it could take a year or more to navigate the process of connecting something as big as a data center to the electric grid, so speculators started filing requests with multiple utilities to see which came through fi…

In addition to land and power, developers need building permits, air permits, and sometimes rezoning. Never a fast process in the best of times, it has become more fraught as local opposition has grown. At least 75 projectswere blocked or delayedin the first quarter of the year. Hyperscalers will pay a premium for land that is permitted and shovel-ready, sometimes 20 times what the land was worth before. They are paying for speed.

The business of putting these ingredients together is known as “powered land assemblage.” Commercial real estate firms and dedicated companies likeCloverleaf Infrastructureare searching the country for suitable plots and power. So are countlessindependent operators, sometimes called “data center wildcatters,” freelance speculators who might look at acres of unzoned farmland north of Great Salt Lake and see an opportunity.

It would not be the first time speculators have come to this part of Utah seeking wealth and promising a new technological future. A few miles south of Hansel Valley, two locomotives face each other across the final stretch of the transcontinental railroad alluded to in O’Leary’s press release. It is a monument to the era’s industrial achievement and to its frequent wasteful inefficiencies. With the companies paid by the mile and racing to …

The man who called Munns inquiring about land was Austin Pritchett, an entrepreneur based in Alpine, Utah. Pritchett earned an MBA from Cornell in 2016, according to his LinkedIn, and practices a form of real estate development that finds profit in getting raw land zoned and permitted for construction. Municipal records illustrate one version of the model: Partner with owners of farmland near an expanding city, line up a homebuilder willing to bu…

“Builders need entitled land,” a page for one of Pritchett’s workshops reads. “They don’t want to spend 12–18 months navigating zoning boards. Hand them a permitted site and they’ll pay a premium typically 2–3x what the raw land cost.” His previous publicly documented projects were mostly suburban housing, but last October, he added a new lesson: “New Portal and Data Center Land (Current Gold Rush).”

By November 2025, Pritchett was approaching landowners in Hansel Valley. He was very polite, according to a landowner he met with at the time, LuAnn Adams. “They said, ‘Shh, don’t tell anybody, don’t tell anybody,’” she later said at a county meeting. “So I kept it to myself for a little while.”

Pritchett later said he was drawn to Hansel Valley because much of the land was owned by only a few people, making it straightforward to acquire. But the most enticing thing it had to offer was the 42-inch-diameter gas pipeline running through it, offering a fast route to abundant power.

A data center would be a far bigger project than anything Pritchett had handled before. He contacted a fellow Alpine resident, former Congressman Jason Chaffetz. Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor, texted O’Leary, who he knew from appearing on television together. O’Leary had passed on Chaffetz’s past pitches, Chaffetz said, but this one piqued his interest.

“I like interacting with Kevin because he responds right away,” Chaffetz says. He introduced O’Leary to Pritchett and will be compensated if the project “comes together,” he said, though the details of the arrangement are bound by an NDA.

On December 16th, a lobbyist emailed the governor’s scheduler to say that O’Leary would be in town in a few weeks. “KO from Shark Tank would like to meet with the Gov on Jan 8 to discuss data centers in UT,” the lobbyist wrote.

Gov. Spencer Cox and the Utah legislature had been working to make the state attractive to data centers, which are an appealing source of tax revenue for state governments. Utah already exempted data centers from paying sales tax on certain equipment, and in 2024 Cox launched “Operation Gigawatt,” an effort to double the state’s electricity generation, in part to support all the data center developers who had expressed interest in coming to…

O’Leary arrived at the Statehouse on the morning of January 8th and hadhis photo taken sitting behind the governor’s desk. The next day, he appeared on NewsNation and discussed meeting Cox and Senate President J. Stuart Adams. Adams, seen by many as the most powerful political figure in the state, was also the chairman of the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), a state development authority created to facilitate projects conne…

When Pritchett came out to the Munns’ property two months later, he described a project that already sounded far along, according to Tim Munns and his son, Bud. The state was involved. Pritchett said he already had the necessary land and water rights under contract. He just wanted a bit of the Munns’ property on the margin, and if he didn’t get it, the Munnses understood, he had other options.

“He wasn’t pushy,” Bud says. “He just flat laid out the facts and said, ‘Now you guys decide what you want to do.’”

As for what was coming, Bud couldn’t wrap his head around it. He didn’t know what MIDA was, though he serves in the Air National Guard and the idea that the data center might have a military use appealed to him. He’d watchedShark Tanka few times but had to Google which one Kevin O’Leary was. As for what the valley would look like after the “biggest data center in the world” landed in it, he had no idea. “Anything of the magnitude of…

Tim told the commissioners, and with the project sounding increasingly real, they redoubled their efforts to figure out what was going on. One of them called their state senator, Scott Sandall, who said he would ask around. Soon afterward, Commissioner Perry received a text from Paul Morris, then the executive director of MIDA, saying that he’d gotten his number from the senator and that he would be at the county courthouse the next morning to …

Morris, along with the developer, Pritchett, arrived at the Box Elder County Courthouse in Brigham City on the morning of March 25th and informed the commissioners that their county would be getting an AI data center powered by a 9-gigawatt gas plant. Morris said that 40,000 acres had been secured for the project and tax subsidies had already been negotiated — the developers would pay no property taxes on its servers, get 80 percent of their pr…

What they needed now was for the commissioners to formally approve the “MIDA project area,” an “irrevocable” decision, according to the MIDA statute, that would put the agency in charge of all land use decisions from that point onward, essentially making the agency its own municipality.

Morris and Pritchett apologized for not telling the commissioners earlier, Perry and Tyler Vincent, the commission chair, said. Actually, the commissioners were told, a lobbyist had said that he had already spoken to the commissioners and that they were on board. When the commissioners demanded to know who this lobbyist was, Morris refused to name him.

But it was too late to slow down. Morris told the commissioners that if they didn’t sign the county consent before the end of April, financing for the deal would fall apart.

Anyway, the data center would be good for Box Elder, Morris tried to convince them. Even after the tax subsidies, Box Elder would still get tens of millions in revenue.

“You have no idea what you’ve started,” Vincent recalls telling Morris. “You just screwed these two commissioners, they won’t win their races because of what you’ve done,” he said, pointing to Perry and the commissioner Boyd Bingham, who faced primaries in June.

The commissioners were still dealing with the fallout from “the fairground debacle,” the weeks of outrage and apologies resulting from its decision to end subsidizedhorse stall rentalsat the county fairground without sufficient public input. “What you’ve just done is going to make that experience look like a walk in the park.”

Perry didn’t believe MIDA’s deadline. Born and raised in Box Elder, Perry had joined the highway patrol and served on the governor’s security detail in the early 1990s. Organizing for a pay raise opened his eyes to what politics could accomplish, and after his local representative failed to show up for an event he organized or respond to repeated emails, he ran against him and won. He served five terms and retired to work in the private sec…

“I’ve never seen anything go this fast in all the time I’ve been in politics,” Perry said. “You can’t even build a house that fast.”

But MIDA moved quickly, emailing the commissioners an agreement to be approved on April 15th, then PR material for after their vote. The commissioners had some complaints about the language. “From what we’ve seen, Kevin O’Leary, the investor, has also been using similar messaging about the county ‘inviting’ the project to come. Which is just the wrong word,” a county attorney wrote.

Because the land was unzoned and the developers were building their own power and water systems, the commissioners’ options were limited. They could refuse to consent to MIDA’s project area, but they worried that the developers might sue. In his research, Perry came acrossthe case of Saline Township in Michigan, where the town board rejected a rezoning request for an OpenAI data center. The developer sued, alleging exclusionary zoning. The to…

Utah real estate entrepreneur Austin Pritchett begins approaching Box Elder County landowners about a data center project. Former congressman Jason Chaffetz introduces him to celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary.

O’Leary’s team meets with Gov. Spencer Cox and later meets with state Senate President Stuart Adams, who chaired MIDA.

The developers announce “Wonder Valley Utah,” a proposed 7.5-gigawatt data center campus, in a press release that attracts little public attention.

Landowners alert county commissioners to the project. MIDA formally briefs the commissioners on March 25th and tells them approval is needed by the end of April or the deal could collapse.

MIDA sends the county an agreement to approve, along with a press release written for the commissioners. The first public-meeting agenda refers only to an “interlocal agreement,” without mentioning a data center; commissioners meet but postpone the vote.

MIDA’s board approves the 40,000-acre project area before the county commissioners consent. O’Leary describes the project as part of a “race” with China. Word about the project begins to spread in Box Elder County.

At a packed county meeting, MIDA cannot say how much of the project would serve the military, and major engineering studies remain unfinished. Commissioners postpone the vote until May 4th.

More than 1,000 people attend the final meeting. Commissioners allow no public comment, leave the stage amid protests, and approve the project from a back room.

Residents organize a referendum campaign. The county rejects their applications, prompting a lawsuit. The developer also withdraws a contested water-rights application while planning to refile it later.

Adams and two county commissioners who support the project lose their Republican primaries. O’Leary and two Fox News hosts retract claims that protesters and project opponents were working for China; O’Leary and Fox News are later sued for defamation.

The project has been downsized and remains stalled. No tenant has been announced, no land has been transferred to the developers, and several central agreements remain unsigned.

If a data center was coming, the commissioners felt that the developers should pay for the cost of the additional services it would require, an amount the county estimated to be $16.2 million. The county, Morris, and the developers haggled over the terms as the April 15th target passed and moved to April 22nd, the commission’s next scheduled meeting.

A public notice was issued for the vote. It appeared on the county’supcoming agendaas item 9A, “Interlocal Agreement #26-15 Between Box Elder County and the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) Relating to the Stratos Project Area,” using a project name Morris said MIDA liked because it was Greek for “army.” There was no mention of a data center.

Anticipating blowback, Perry texted Pritchett to make sure that the landowners would show up to publicly say they were in favor of the project.

But with the contract still in flux, the commissioners postponed voting to a later meeting — “If you would like to speak to that, please fill a form out,” Vincent said — and the meeting instead became Stratos’ quiet debut. It was a small, subdued event. Shane Holmgren, the largest landowner and the first approached by Pritchett, was “100 percent supportive of this.” Others were less enthusiastic, worrying about traffic or water use….

“The only one that enjoys change is a baby,” Tim Munns said, philosophically, at the meeting. After days of thinking and discussions with his family, he had decided to sell. It had been the military connection that convinced him. That and the project’s inevitability, he said.

“If it’s going to happen and we’re going to watch it happen in this valley, then we’re going to be at the table instead of being on the menu,” he later tells me.

Two days later, on Friday morning, MIDA held its own meeting to approve the project area. The paperwork wasn’t quite finished, Morris said, but it was 95 or 98 percent of the way there. Nor had the county itself given its consent. Morris said the commissioners would meet at 5 that afternoon — “the fastest they could put it together” — though the commissioners would again delay.

MIDA’s event was a more celebratory affair, consisting mostly of Morris and other MIDA officials marveling at the speed at which they had moved. O’Leary appeared on a video call, taking a seat before a photo of skyscrapers.

“What’s extraordinary about Utah is I heard about this opportunity just five months ago. That’s it. And here we are on the cusp of doing something absolutely phenomenal together. That’s leadership,” he said, thanking Cox, House Speaker Schultz, MIDA, and Adams, the Senate president who was also the chairman of the MIDA board. It was important to move fast, O’Leary said, because it was a race, not just with China, but with other data c…

This was something O’Leary was well suited to do. He had spent two decades turning himself into one of the business world’s most visible promoters. O’Leary came up through educational software in the 1990s, acquiring rivals like The Learning Company, which he sold to Mattel in 1999 for roughly $4 billion. It was a disaster for Mattel, which was sued along with O’Leary for misrepresenting The Learning Company’s financial state. (Mattel s…

He has parlayed his fame into several businesses, including O’Leary Ventures, O’Shares Investments, and O’Leary Fine Wines. In 2021, he took stakes in FTX in a deal to become a “spokesperson and ambassador” for the company, which collapsed the following year and whose CEO is currently in prison for fraud. His first foray into data centers came in 2022, when he invested in and promoted a bitcoin miner called Bitzero. (After posting net l…

“Introducing Wonder Valley: The Largest AI Compute Data Center Park on Earth,”he postedon X at the time, embedding a video of an eagle flying through renderings of a lush and futuristic campus.

“Wonder Valley Utah” would apparently also be the world’s largest. “Forty thousand acres, I don’t think there’s a bigger facility in the world than this,” O’Leary said onFox and Friendsthree days after the MIDA vote. “We’re going to build the largest data center in the world here,” he said hours later in another Fox appearance. Then heposted the clipto his 4 million LinkedIn followers under a red banner that read, “WE’RE…

O’Leary’s hyperbole can be best understood as a pitch to the hyperscale tech companies about what the data center could be if they were to sign on as tenants, the investor Paul Kedrosky says. These investors don’t care whether AI turns out to be profitable. What they care about is that a very profitable tech company is going to occupy the data center and be contractually obligated to pay them a fixed return no matter how AI turns out. “It…

For developers, this presents what Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Digital, calls a “chicken-and-egg problem.” In order to finance construction of a data center, you need an anchor tenant, but all tenants care about is speed, so the best way to attract one is to get everything aside from the actual data center — land, power, permitting — ready to go. “If you’re talking to a hyperscaler today, they’ll say, ‘Don’t even talk to me…

This dynamic is part of the reason there are so many “world’s largest data centers,” more even than O’Leary’s two. Mixed in with real construction projects are paper data centers, speculative ventures specced out to their maximum theoretical capacity and announced as if they were shovel-ready with the aim of catching the attention of a hyperscale tenant. Many amount to nothing or very little. It’s been nearly two years since O’Leary…

The result is a structural dissonance in the data center buildout, where projects are pitched to a small group of tech titans in grandiose terms that to people who live near these projects sound maximally nightmarish. O’Leary brought a showman’s flair to the job.

“Kevin O’Leary isn’t pitching Utahns when he says, ‘We have 40,000 acres. It’s going to be the biggest data center ever,’” said Clint Betts, CEO of the Utah tech industry group Silicon Slopes. “He’s not even thinking about Utahns. He’s pitching potential tenants. And I think that’s what pisses Utahns off.”

Whether O’Leary’s pitch reached its intended audience was unclear. It unquestionably reached Utahns.

Brenna Williams heard about the data center at the grocery store. “You couldn’t walk down the hall someplace or go to McDonald’s or go out for coffee. Everybody was talking about it, and nobody was happy.”

Williams was particularly unhappy. In November, Joule Capital Partners had broken ground on a 4,000-acre data center campus 9 miles from her second home in western Utah, where she had planned to retire. A month later, work began nearby on another data center, this one 10GW and advertised as the world’s largest. Now there was a third data center, this one near her actual home in Box Elder, where she had raised two kids stargazing and rock huntin…

Williams, a former government econometrician and college instructor, speaks methodically in a calm monotone as she enumerates the many reasons why the data center “doesn’t make sense” — a refrain. First among them is the water, an acutely sensitive issue in Utah in part thanks to Gov. Cox himself, who has declared repeated drought emergencies and urged residents to take shorter showers and cut back on watering their lawns. There is no mor…

“We have to report on our neighbors if they’re watering at the wrong times or on the wrong days,” Williams says. (There’s a hotline.) “But we have water to cool a power plant and cool the data center? It doesn’t make sense.”

The question of data center water use is best thought of as a tradeoff between water and energy. Servers produce heat, and that heat must be removed from the building. An energy-efficient way of doing so is to transfer the heat into water, some of which evaporates, but the amount of water lost to evaporation can be significant. Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, is cooled in this manner. A much smaller facility than the gigawatt-scale …

Heat can also be ejected directly into the outside air, similar to a home air conditioner’s exhaust. This method can use very little water, but it uses more of the electricity data centers already consume in immense quantities — electricity that, depending on how it’s generated, also uses water. According to a 2024 analysis fromLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, such “indirect” water consumption is about 12 times greater than the am…

As is currently common in the industry, the Stratos developers and MIDA officials emphasized that the data center itself would use a “closed-loop cooling system” that would be filled once and reused. Thecounty’s agreementwith MIDA even specifically forbids water-intensive evaporative cooling. But the agreement also stipulates that none of these protections apply to the power plant, and it is the power plant that is listed as the primary use…

Williams did not typically attend commission meetings, but when one was scheduled for the Monday after the MIDA vote, she showed up early and took a seat inside the courthouse, intending to make her displeasure known. So did around a hundred other people, more than the room could fit. They stood in the back, some holding signs, filled the hallway outside, spilled out onto the front steps.

They would not, however, get the opportunity to speak. “Public comment was held last week,” Vincent replied to a shouted question, though at that first meeting, where attendees primarily consisted of landowners the developer had personally invited, Vincent had promised a second comment period at the next meeting.

The commissioners went on to question Pritchett and a MIDA official named Hilary Venable for an hour with vague results. No one could explain what percentage of the facility was for military use or even what that use would be.

Regarding the water use of the gas plant, Pritchett said they would use “new air-cooling technologies that are zero water,” or at least he was pretty sure they would — the “exact technology partnerships of the newer power technology are not totally solidified.” (“I’m hearing a lot of ‘if’s,’” someone shouted from the audience.) When Perry asked why the commission was being rushed, Pritchett replied that actually, he was bein…

Perry’s announcement that the commissioners would postpone their vote for another week to sort through all the questions they’d received from constituents was met with cheers from the audience. Next time, Perry said, the meeting would be held at the county fairground to accommodate the apparently large public interest.

According to an August survey fromHeatmap, 75 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built near them. People feel more positively about nuclear power plantsby a 20-point margin. Dislike of data centers might be the most unifying issue in America today, though it is less that everyone is in agreement, one Utah activist told me, than that data centers provide something for everyone to hate.

Some oppose data centers on environmental grounds. Others find them ugly. They are such large industrial projects that solving one problem tends to raise others: Avoid raising electricity prices by building a power plant and air pollution and noise become problems. When Pritchett tried to assuage water concerns by promising an air-cooled gas turbine, a physics professor at Utah State University, Robert Davies, did someback-of-the-envelope mathand…

That these enormous projects often arrive with little warning only intensifies the opposition, especially because their approval generally runs through local government. Americans may distrustCongress,corporations, and themedia, but a majority doesstill trusttheir local government. It’s where people still expect democracy to work. The ability of small groups of citizens to block development is so great that some see it as a national crisis; in …

That trust helps explain the extraordinary emotion on display at data center meetings: Across the country, residents scream at their commissioners, sometimes break down in tears, after learning that their representatives approved a project they barely knew existed. The outrage is a level above disagreement with a land use decision. It feels like betrayal.

In Utah, the speed at which Stratos seemed to materialize was taken by some as evidence of conspiracy. Unsubstantiated claims of bribery were leveled at everyone from Cox, whose family founded the telecom company CentraCom, to the commissioners, because they might get seats on a MIDA advisory board. Dozens of people submitted comments to the county’s website alleging corruption and “back-room deals.” How else could something so big come tog…

Few believed the developers’ claims about water use and few trusted government assurances that Stratos would need to follow state environmental regulations no matter what technology it ended up using. Loopholes would be found, promises broken. There seemed to be a different set of rules for the O’Learys and Zuckerbergs of the world; just look at the speed at which this moved, one resident said, compared to the meetings and permitting he’d h…

Strange political alignments began to form. Progressive activists like Deeda Seed, senior campaigner at the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, found herself on the same side as Phil Lyman, a far-right former state representative who in 2020 waspardonedby Donald Trump for a conviction resulting from leading an ATV ride through a canyon closed to protect Native American cliff dwellings. Seed worried about the environmental impacts…

“We think that taking time makes things better or safer. It absolutely does not,”Cox said.

Even law enforcement officials monitoring the growing backlash noticed that something unusual was happening. Ahead of the commission meeting, an intelligence analyst with the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center (SIAC) emailed a sheriff to say that while there were no concrete threats, people were “very angry,” and at least two of them had posted GIFs of guillotines. Notably, the groups attending the meeting were of “opposing ideo…

On the advice of the law enforcement, the commissioners parked on the side of the road several miles from the fairground and were taken by squad car to the metal hangar-like hall where the meeting would be held. They toured the space — a basketball court with its bleachers withdrawn and scoreboard dark, rows of folding chairs facing a table draped in American flag bunting — and went to a back room to wait and go over their notes as they liste…

Over the preceding days, the commissioners had been inundated with thousands of messages urging them to slow or stop the project. They had also received several calls from state lawmakers and officials telling them to vote yes.

“Would love to talk to you about the AI project if you have some time,” state Rep. Tom Peterson texted Perry on April 27th.

“Hey Lee, Scott here. Just wanted to, uh, pick your brain, compare a few notes, share a few thoughts on the data center when you get a minute, give me a call,” state Sen. Sandall said in a voicemail the next day.

Perry also got calls from the governor’s office and from the speaker of the house, he said. “They all kept saying,This is a great thing for the state of Utah. We need to get it done.”

As the date of the fairground meeting neared, MIDA became increasingly forceful, Perry and Vincent both said. MIDA had now given them one supposedly final deadline after another, and the commission had missed each one. Now a fourth vote was scheduled, and the public opposition was only growing.

“That’s when they came in and told us, ‘Well, if you guys just really feel like you have to vote no, you can vote no, and we’ll find another way to make it happen,’” Perry said. “‘But just so you know, you won’t get any of the protections or any of the guardrails that you’ve negotiated, and you certainly won’t get the amount of tax money that we’ve been talking about.’”

The lawyer the commission had retained agreed that the county had little power to stop the project, Perry and Vincent say. Still, Perry wrote two speeches the day before: one where he voted yes and another where he voted no, acknowledging the public outrage and warning that they may all have to pay higher taxes to fund the legal fight likely to come. Despite the furor, he did not have a clear sense that that was what his constituents wanted. Many…

When the commissioners finally walked out, they saw more than a thousand people filling the hall, many holding signs. They were greeted with applause as they took their seats. But the mood shifted the moment Vincent said, “Just a couple of housekeeping things: As last Monday, there will be no public comment period.”

“Enough, enough. Quiet down right now,” yelled Vincent, his voice going hoarse, banging the gavel. “Please be quiet. Be courteous. Isn’t that who we are in the state of Utah?”

“The closed-loop design means the data center won’t consume any more water than a typical office park or an— “

Williams, in the audience, was frustrated both by what she was hearing and with the hecklers, because she wanted to hear what the commissioners had to say. Some in the audience called for quiet, but they were overpowered by the crowd, which roared at every mention of electricity, water, or possible benefits.

“Plus, it will create jobs, boost our local economy, and strengthen our military for years to come— “

“We tried to get the department of Air Quality to come, but since no application has been filed, they would not. However, I was able to speak with an engineer—” the county attorney said, to more boos.

“Did you mention something about the dark sky thing?” Bingham tried to ask the county lawyer. “We had an agreement with MIDA on that.”

“For hell’s sake, grow up!” Bingham shouted, eliciting more and louder boos.

And with that, the commissioners stood, walked off the stage, and went into a back room, their contingency plan if the crowd became unruly. After 15 minutes of confused milling about, the crowd watched as a projection screen descended from the ceiling and the commissioners reappeared on video, now seated behind a folding table in a small fluorescent-lit room, police officers standing by the doorway. The meeting resumed and they voted to approve t…

The sheriff told the commissioners to wait for the crowd to disperse before heading home. That evening, Sen. Sandall texted Perry, “You did the right thing.”

The image of elected officials fleeing their constituents to approve a data center in a literal back room was immediately explosive. Video of Bingham’s “For hell’s sake, grow up” was clipped, turned into songs, and seen by millions. O’Leary’s boasts about a 40,000-acre site was transformed through viral telephone into a data center that was itself three times the size of Manhattan, depicted with an image of a building footprint overla…

All manner of online personalities converged on the story. There were environmental activists, travel influencers, guys in windowless rooms talking about the technocratic superstate, and hustlers shilling get-rich-with-AI courses trying to draft off the viral fury. The comedian Walter Masterson went to O’Leary’s neighborhood in Miami Beach with a petition to put the data center inhis backyard. A prominent Utah drought-resistant gardener poste…

In Box Elder, Williams had gone home from the fairground vote furious and logged in to Facebook. So had dozens of other residents. “You could feel the heat coming off the keyboards, there was so much anger,” she said.

Brigette Cottam, a Brigham City mother of four, had missed the meeting but saw the video of Bingham shouting “for hell’s sake, grow up” — “Oh, they yelled at us?” — and also logged on. “Doomscrolling, I just saw post after post after post, like, what do we even do about this? What can we do about this?”

So she googled what to do when your county commissioners pass something nobody wants. The answer was to file a referendum, in this case one challenging the county’s consent to the project. Facebook pinged with volunteers. “Me, me, me, me. It was like ‘I am Spartacus,’” Cottam said.

The next morning, Williams, Cottam, and three others met at the Box Elder County Courthouse to get the paperwork. Later that week, they convened again, now with two dozen people around a nearby picnic table, and assigned roles. They called the group Box Elder Accountability Referendum, or BEAR, and started referring to themselves as “mama bears” in their posts. Soon they had 2,500 volunteers signed up.

Box Elder is a conservative county. Nearly 80 percent voted for Trump in the last election, including Williams. She describes the BEAR coalition as spanning “MAGA to Marxist.” Her husband is MAGA; her son, Marxist. They try not to discuss politics, except the data center, which unites them.

Utah’s Republican primary was just over a month away — often the decisive election in the deeply Republican state — and as outrage over the data center grew, politicians who had been instrumental in its arrival began distancing themselves from the project.

Coxsaidthat he’d heard from Utahns with “real concerns” about environmental impact and tweeted that the developers had agreed to seek approval for the project in phases rather than all at once, something that almost certainly would have been the case anyway. “The process was not good,”Cox later said, adding that he had long been concerned about MIDA. “That was not a decision that was made by me or the legislature.”

House Speaker Schultz, who Perry said had called him before the vote to tell him the project was good for Utah and the county, now saidhe supported BEAR’s referendum.

The backtracking infuriated Adams, the Senate president and MIDA chair, who now found himself alone in an increasingly competitive primary challenge, according to a source with knowledge of his campaign.

With state officials running for cover, the Box Elder County commissioners were left defending their vote as the least bad option. The public’s fury did not abate. Police were stationed outside the commissioners’ homes. Someone emailed Perry telling him to light himself on fire. Perry choked upspeaking about threats he’d received with news station KSL. Soon, they stopped giving interviews at all. Their campaign signs lining the streets of B…

The developers too attempted an appeasement campaign. This wasn’t going to be the ugly concrete box you’re thinking of, Palandjian told the design publicationDezeen, unveiling renderings depicting a modernist glass building nestled beneath mountains glowing at golden hour. Yes, there might be a “man camp” housing the thousands of construction workers, but it was going to be the best man camp you’ve ever seen. “We want this to be the s…

The developer withdrew a water rights application that had garnered thousands of protests. It was a tactical move. Pritchett texted Perry that their plans remained unchanged. “Hopefully some people will lose attention to the matter and others will see it as a win,” Pritchett wrote.

They did not. In fact, the move only made people angrier, because filing a protest required paying a fee. Now 3,000 people felt O’Leary had personally stiffed each of them out of $15. A local professional skier and environmental activist posted a video of herself calling the Division of Water Resources and confirming that no, they would not be getting refunds.

In any case, all these conciliatory gestures were doomed to fail because at the same time, O’Leary was repeatedly going on television and posting about how his critics were bussed-in “professional protesters” working for theChinese Communist Party.

“What the hell are they taking Chinese money for?” O’Leary exclaimed on May 20th, in one of several similar appearances onFoxduring the period. “All proven all through these nefarious entities,” he said, holding up a colorful chart and claiming to have received a call from five government “special agents” interested in his investigation.

A few days later I called Palandjian, who went into more detail. “Everybody’s freaked out about AI and what it could do. AI is here already. We have the ability with our data scientists to see, you see those same five protesters that are in Utah protesting this project were in Michigan protesting that data center project. They’re on college campuses protesting and spouting antisemitic things. It’s all part of the same thing. And before th…

When I asked whether he had performed facial recognition on the protesters, he said no, he meant that those tools existed, but “we’ve seen JPEGs.”

Maybe on a different issue O’Leary could have mustered some politically polarized support. With data centers, though, he encountered mostly skepticism, even from the right. When he went on Tucker Carlson’s show, Carlson, ever an astute reader of the national mood, dismissed O’Leary’s China fears. Instead, he repeatedly challenged him to explain why data centers were good for Americans rather than being an aesthetic “offense against God …

As for Utahns themselves, having a Canadian celebrity tycoon accuse them of being bussed-in Chinese agents just made them even angrier.

By the time I arrived in Box Elder in mid-May, it seemed that O’Leary had succeeded in uniting the entire state both against his data center and himself personally. The activists he had called Chinese agents were doing a brisk business selling merch making fun of his “Utah National Security” hat. At a protest at the Capitol, there were as many signs attacking O’Leary as there were about data centers: “Keep sharks out of Great Salt Lake,…

They were against Stratos for all the reasons people are against data centers: concerns about water use, air pollution, noise, ugliness, tax breaks for wealthy corporations and billionaires. Yet many industrial projects share these problems and elicit nothing like the breadth and emotional intensity of the data center backlash. It’s popular to attribute the intensity to anxieties about AI itself, that data centers are only a physical proxy for …

“We don’t need this!” said Kristen Hadley at a commission meeting. She had not planned to speak but had become emotional listening to people list their fears to the impassive commissioners. She was 56 years old and had been told by her three daughters that the world was “too dangerous and toxic” to bring grandchildren into, she said, beginning to cry. She had watched the lake dry up. Now here came an enormous industrial project, and for…

“What does it mean to beat China in the AI race? What does it mean to lose?” asked Betts, of Silicon Slopes. “I’ve been in tech my whole life, and I don’t know what it means, and I don’t think our leaders know what it means.”

People were so unconvinced by the given explanations for the AI buildout that some invented their own nefarious reasons that billionaires and government officials might have for urgently building gigantic data centers all over the country. Residents told commissioners that the data center was going to be used by the government to surveil opponents of Project 2025 and by the United Nations to carry out something called Agenda 21. The phrase “vir…

It’s reassuring to imagine there is any such plan behind the data center frenzy rather than an arms race inside an arms race driven forward by financial speculation, a runaway process that even the people who initiated ithypothesizemight end with the entire planet tiled with data centers. Facing the growing backlash, AI executives have lately tried to sketch a more enticing future, emphasizing the possibility of abundance and empowerment in add…

Box Elder’s attorney rejected BEAR’s referendum; BEAR sued, and the case is ongoing. But the June primary brought a political reckoning.

In a last-minute gambit to get on the right side of the electorate, Adams sent a public letter to O’Leary demanding he scale down the project. O’Leary agreed to remove half of the allotted 40,000 acres, resulting in media coverage reporting that the project had been cut in half despite the fact that it was never clear what would go on that land and the scale of the data center itself remained unchanged. In any case, the gambit failed.Adams lo…

At MIDA, Morris, the executive director who’d spearheaded the project, retired. His replacement was Dan Hemmert, a former Utah senator and MIDA consultant who worked on Stratos.Cox sayshe will be pushing for “major reform” of the agency.

Perry still thinks approving the deal was the only real option, but he keeps running through other scenarios in his mind. Maybe if he’d called a press conference immediately after that first MIDA meeting, he wonders, he could have embarrassed the state into backing down. Maybe he could have made the MIDA officials hold town halls and face the public anger themselves. “But that’s all hindsight,” he says. His advice to other commissioners: …

O’Leary continues to say that the project is “full steam ahead” and that he hopes to break ground in the next 12 months on the first phase, which has been downsized to a single gigawatt.

But little has happened since the county’s May 4th vote. Though MIDA had spent weeks warning commissioners that their consent could not wait, by late September the county remained the only party to have signed the interlocal agreement. Citing ongoing litigation over the referendum, MIDA has left its own signature blank and paused work on Stratos. The agency declined further comment, also citing the referendum and litigation. None of the land al…

When the project resumes, it will face a less friendly political landscape. In August, Utah lawmakers inundated with constituent messages and unnerved by the fall of Adamsheld hearingson data center regulation in preparation for next year’s session. The commissioner of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality called noise and heat “major gaps” the agency planned to study.

The prospect of regulation and determined opposition may make occupancy less attractive. As will the project’s infamy. AI companies are coming to the belated realization that they have a public image problem, and true to his word, O’Leary did make sure the world heard about Stratos. There is likely no better-known data center on theplanet.