Plans for a celebrity-backed “hyperscale” data center in rural Utah, so massive that it would consume more than double the state’s current electricity use, have generated an intense public and political backlash in a state where the motto is “industry” and a Republican supermajority tends to be deferential to development. 

The project, brought by “Shark Tank” TV personality Kevin O’Leary, would span 40,000 acres, demand 9 gigawatts of power once completed, and raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64 percent, according to estimates. While its water needs remain unknown, the sprawling data center would neighbor the northernmost tip of the shrinking Great Salt Lake, which will likely hit a record-low elevation this year following an unprecedented dry winter.

It could also create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University. Davies estimated that the finished project would cover about as many square miles as Washington, D.C., making it the largest data center on the planet, and that it could produce enough heat to spike nighttime temperatures by as much as 28 degrees Fahrenheit in the high-desert valley. 

“I suspected it would not be good,” Davies said. “What I’ve found is, it’s so much worse than I even thought it would be.”

News of the proposed data complex, dubbed the Stratos Project, became public in April after the three commissioners of Box Elder County, the mostly agricultural community that would host it, approved the project. They pointed to the project’s approval by more powerful state agencies and asserted that stopping it was out of their hands, while refusing to hear comments from more than 1,000 people who showed up to share their concerns. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, has since walked back some of his full-throated support.

“Many are asking questions about water, air quality, energy, land use, and the long-term impact on rural Utah,” Cox wrote in a thread on X earlier this month after intense public outcry over the project. “Those are real concerns, and all Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability.”

The controversy in Utah is a stark illustration of a wider trend. Across the United States, data centers are drawing bipartisan backlash as communities clash with tech giants and developers over strained water supplies and spiking energy costs.

At least two other massive data campus projects are proposed elsewhere in Utah, but they have not received anywhere near the pushback as the Stratos Project. Many opponents have pointed to efforts state leaders have made in recent years to support water conservation — Utah is among the driest states in the country — and the state legislature’s multi-million dollar investments to help the Great Salt Lake refill. The lake’s drying bed has already become a source of toxic dust threatening the health of millions of residents living on the Wasatch Front, Utah’s urban core. 

It seems contradictory, then, to build a potentially water-intensive and explosively hot industrial development right next door to such an endangered and iconic spot. 

“The greed behind this deal is clearly blinding the officials to just how much is at stake for the rest of us,” wrote Monika Norwid of Salt Lake City, one of the Utah residents who sent comments to the state’s Division of Water Rights protesting the project. “I refuse to let this greed imperil our already fragile wildlife, I refuse to allow some useless technology steal the rest of our insufficient water for a project that is way beyond the scale of this area.”

In an interview with CNN, O’Leary downplayed the environmental impact of his project, saying Stratos is “not going to destroy air quality” and “not going to drain the Great Salt Lake.”

Austin Pritchett, a cofounder of West GenCo, the developer partnering with O’Leary Digital Limited on the project, said that they plan to purchase roughly 3,000 acre‑feet of on‑site water rights and already have around 10,000 acre‑feet under contract from the nearby town of Snowville if needed. 

Added together, that’s enough water to supply the basic needs of more than 20,000 Utah households. Utah’s Division of Water Rights has only received one application for the project so far — to transfer 1,900 acre-feet currently used for irrigation by the Bar H Ranch. That application was pulled last week, but a representative with the ranch said it will refile and “fully intends to move forward with the project.” A division spokesperson said they anticipate more applications from the data center developers soon.

Some scientists worry the project’s power demands and resulting heat island effect will transform its high-desert climate into something more akin to the Sahara.

Stratos would build its own power plant, state supporters have said, and its fuel will likely come from a corridor carrying natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada, Oregon, and California called the Ruby Pipeline. O’Leary specifically chose Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley to build the complex because the pipeline spans it, state officials have said.

“It could generate power at a significant level,” said Paul Morris, executive director of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a powerful quasi-governmental state agency that provides tax incentives for development, during a public meeting in April. “This location was picked because of the gas pipeline.”

Davies, the physics professor, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to better understand the sheer scale of the 9-gigawatt project. And what he’s penciled out so far has him alarmed.

“Nine gigawatts, that’s a number that’s really challenging to get your brain around,” the professor said. ”Communicating the scale has been a real problem.”

The entire project will actually produce roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal energy, according to Davies. It starts with the massive on-site power generation, which will generate 7 to 8 gigawatts of waste heat just producing the needed electricity for the data center, since gas plants are only about 57 percent efficient.

And once that electricity reaches the data center, every watt will turn into pure heat, because anytime a gadget consumes power, it converts it into heat, Davies explained, whether it’s a toaster, a car, or a sprawling rack of computer servers.

Typically, waste heat from end uses of electricity is dumped far from a power plant, in homes, businesses, or on roads where it dissipates. In this case, the Stratos project will release roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal energy into Hansel Valley, according to Davies. That trapped thermal load is the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.

That doesn’t mean the project would wipe out the landscape with an explosion or release dangerous nuclear radiation, but the heat it creates could devastate the local ecology.

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high-desert environment? A valley?”

Davies thinks dumping that much heat into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by 5 degrees F during the day and up to 28 degrees at night.

“That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” said Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who has reviewed Davies’ estimates. “This would absolutely change the landscape.”

Evaporation would spike. The dew point could collapse, with devastating consequences on wildlife, plants, and the fertility of land owned by other ranchers in the valley, Abbott and Davies said. Abbott suspects Hansel Valley would become another source of dust on the Wasatch Front, in addition to the exposed and drying lake bed of the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

“I’m happy to be further educated. Maybe I’m getting something wrong here,” Davies said. “But that is kind of the point, right? You literally have a hyperscale project that is getting no due diligence.”

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Samantha Moilanen contributed to this story.

Earlier this month, Republican county commissioners fast-tracked approval for a 40,000-acre data center in northwest Utah, blocking public comment from hundreds of furious locals. The Stratos project, as the venture is known, is backed by Shark Tank entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary through his investment company O’Leary Digital. It’s designed to reach a 9-gigawatt power capacity, making it one of the largest “hyperscale” data centers in the world; at its projected $100 billion buildout, the center would generate and consume twice as much power as the entire state of Utah currently uses.

Despite a massive public outcry, Box Elder County commissioners unanimously approved the project after facing a contentious crowd in a May 4 meeting at the county fairgrounds. Commissioner Boyd Bingham threatened to have protestors removed by law enforcement, telling them, “For hell’s sake, grow up.” He and his fellow commissioners then left the room and finished the meeting in a closed session, livestreaming their final unanimous vote of 3-0. O’Leary, who did not attend the meeting, claimed on social media that the protestors were “professional… paid, and bused in.” Environmental advocate and former U.S. Senate candidate Caroline Gleich fired back, saying, “Utahns don’t want an out-of-state billionaire controlling our land.”

The controversy around data centers in the U.S. continues to grow; 67 percent of new data center construction is planned for rural areas, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Last year, Rolling Stone reported on Amazon data centers in Eastern Oregon that siphoned tens of millions of gallons of water from state aquifers, worsening a water pollution problem linked to cancer and miscarriages. A $20.5 million class-action settlement agreement reached between Amazon and a group of Oregon residents in March marked the first time a Big Tech company committed to paying damages for public health threats allegedly exacerbated by its data centers.

Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill aimed at putting a federal moratorium on data center construction. “We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity,” Sanders previously said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue.”

Environmental fears, ancestral lands

Utah is facing a critical water shortage driven by the warmest winter in over a century, with snowpack levels at the lowest ever recorded. Scientists say that heat and emissions generated by a colossal data center like the Stratos project would wreak havoc on an area already severely impacted by climate change. There’s concern that the amount of water needed to cool Stratos facilities could further drain the Great Salt Lake, intensifying exposure to toxic sediments in the rapidly shrinking watershed. Wildlife biologists say the heat generated by the center could also disrupt the movement of migratory birds, deer, and antelope.

Patrick Belmont, professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University, says there are serious technical concerns with building a data center of this scale: “It’s like putting a hairdryer that has the energy consumption of New York City in the middle of a fragile desert ecosystem on the shores of one of the most imperiled lakes in the world.” Belmont says the facility would generate enough heat to raise nighttime temperatures by eight to 12 degrees, irrevocably shifting the dew point, the temperature at which water condenses. “It would desiccate the land, and increase evaporation rates in the whole region,” Belmont says, warning that it could affect the landscape and surrounding communities for generations to come. (Belmont’s views are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.​

Carbon emissions from the data center would also have a significant environmental impact, with an estimated output of 30 million tons of CO2 per year exceeding emissions from Utah’s entire transportation sector. “It’s 50 percent more than every vehicle in Utah currently,” Belmont says. “I think a lot of people haven’t wrapped their heads around that.”

O’Leary, known as Mr. Wonderful on the ABC reality show Shark Tank, cites the environmental studies degree he received from the University of Waterloo in 1977 when dismissing concerns about the Stratos project, also known as “Wonder Valley.” (He’s also backing a controversial $70 million data center development under the Wonder Valley name in Alberta, Canada.) O’Leary, who is from Canada, tells Rolling Stone that water cooling won’t be an issue at the Utah facility. “There’s plenty of turbine technology now that uses air cooling, very, very efficiently,” he says, “and there are many examples across the country where they’re building out power from a combination of wind, battery, solar, and natural gas.”

But Stratos wasn’t designed to use a combination of energy sources; as a state official remarked at an April 22 meeting of the Box Elder County Commission, the project will be powered 100 percent off the Ruby Pipeline, a natural gas line that crosses northern Utah from Wyoming en route to Oregon. MIDA Executive Director Paul Morris told the meeting that proximity to the pipeline was the main reason O’Leary selected the site. MIDA spokesperson Kristin Kenney Williams said in a statement to Rolling Stone that “exploring any and all energy sources as Mr. O’Leary highlighted is absolutely a goal throughout the lifetime of the project and as technology advances.”

Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, estimates that, due to the inefficiency of natural gas, the facility would actually consume closer to 16 gigawatts at full capacity, an equivalent to “the energy footprint of 40,000 Walmart supercenters.” He noted that his results derive from a preliminary analysis, which “clearly indicate a full-scale analysis is warranted.”

Darren Parry is a former chairman of the Shoshone Nation, a Native American tribe that has inhabited the Great Plains for over 10,000 years. He recently visited the site in northwest Utah’s Hansel Valley, where, he says, “there are burial grounds about a quarter-mile away from the proposed map — close enough to be within the footprint of the ecological area [of the site].” Parry, who teaches Native American history at Utah State University, is calling for a responsible slowdown of the Stratos project. “There are too many unanswered questions,” he says, “especially if we’re going to have a footprint of something that’s bigger than two cities.” (A note on the Shoshone Nation website says Parry’s comments regarding Stratos “do not represent the official voice or position” of the tribe.)

Regulation runaround?

The Box Elder County commissioners’ May 4 vote gave Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) the green light to create the project area for the Stratos data center on unincorporated land. According to a plan released by MIDA officials, the area comprises 40,000 acres of privately-owned land and 1,200 acres of military and state-owned land — over 62 square miles in total.

Activists have raised questions about a taxpayer-funded state agency championing privately owned facilities in Utah. MIDA was created in 2007, ostensibly to strengthen national defense missions and support military initiatives, but in recent years, the group has backed a range of developments, including a luxury ski resort and a hotel. Project areas under MIDA oversight can offer a variety of incentivizing tax breaks and financing deals to developers. 

The group approved a series of resolutions to move O’Leary’s project forward last month, agreeing to charge lower taxes in a bid to help “lure the hyperscalers” to Utah. O’Leary appeared via video at the meeting, where, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, he lauded the speed at which MIDA officials had moved to greenlight the venture, telling them, “I heard about this opportunity just five months ago. No one has pulled this off this fast, ever.” Speaking on behalf of MIDA, Williams told Rolling Stone that while the “competitive nature” of the project meant that the group needed to move fast to create the project area, “per state regulation, environmental studies and approvals must be achieved — these will take time, and will be very transparent.” 

MIDA officials say the Stratos project is a matter of national security; Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended building data center facilities at an April news conference, saying the state has an obligation to allow the U.S. to stay competitive as a world power. “We have to do this,” Cox said. “We can’t just say ‘no’ and shut the doors and go home and let China win this, this technology race.”

Environmental advocate Caroline Gleich says MIDA’s backing is simply a way to fast-track building the data center without environmental review. “This is one of the largest developments in northern Utah since the transcontinental railroad,” Gleich says. “People are concerned about its potential impacts and the lack of transparency in the approval process.” She spearheaded an online petition to stop the transfer of water rights from ranching to the Stratos project; following a deluge of nearly 4,000 formal protests filed with Utah’s Division of Water Rights, the application was withdrawn. Developers say that they intend to apply again at a later date. “Utah residents spent almost $60,000 filing these protests,” a frustrated Gleich says. “It costs $15 to lodge a complaint. There’s no refund — and no law that says [the developers] can’t just apply and withdraw as many times as they want.”

Gov. Cox’s calls for Utah residents to “pray for rain” to relieve the state from drought are especially galling to Gleich since the Stratos project is projected to require 16.6 billion gallons of water every year — the equivalent of 25,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. “It’s a hard pill to swallow when people are not watering their lawns, taking baths, or having gardens,” Gleich says.

AI-fueled opposition?

After news of the Stratos data center made headlines, O’Leary went on the offensive, claiming the criticism of his project was the result of foreign interference. “The Chinese are hell-bent on shutting down every attempt to enhance [U.S.] computing power,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t believe that the majority of the people that live in Box Elder — the ranchers and the people on the land — are against this project.”  O’Leary accused China of paying protesters and riling up environmentalists on The Tucker Carlson Show, saying that they want to shut down “every single proposal” for U.S. data centers. In a Fox News appearance on May 12, O’Leary accused Gabi Finlayson, a founding partner of the Utah political consulting firm Elevate Strategies, of being a proxy for the Chinese government. Finlayson issued a sardonic reply, saying, “If we were Chinese operatives, we would be the worst operatives in the entire world. Someone alert Beijing that the payment portal to [our] Amex bills is somehow broken.”

Shoshone leader Darren Parry also dismisses O’Leary’s claims that online protestors are being paid, or that out-of-state residents were somehow summoned to oppose the county commission meeting. “People are awake now,” Parry says. “They’re tired of business as usual. They want their values reflected. What makes Utah so beautiful is the environment that we live in; let’s not destroy it.”