Until three months ago, Box Elder County, in northwest Utah, was one of America’s quieter places, with a handful of small towns spread across 6,700 square miles abutting the Great Salt Lake.
Then, in late April, the investor and Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary showed up and announced that one of his companies, O’Leary Digital, was going to spend up to $100 billion to build a data center the likes of which the world has never seen—40,000 acres worth—in an unincorporated portion of the county.
It would be hard to imagine a better spot for a huge data center. Unlike proposed data centers in Kenilworth, New Jersey, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, or any of the dozens of other places where data centers have become lightning rods, Project Stratos, as it’s being called, will be far from the nearest town. If it emits noise, no one will hear it. O’Leary Digital’s CEO, Paul Palandjian, says that it will be cooled using recycled water via a “closed loop” system, instead of diverting water from the nearby communities. It plans to pipe in natural gas for energy—instead of pulling from the electric grid—and it signed an agreement to pay an estimated $30 million in annual taxes, money to “support schools, emergency services, and local infrastructure,” according to county officials.
Nevertheless, as has been the case in other parts of the country, opponents of the project quickly emerged. They complained that Project Stratos would damage the environment of “our drought-ridden and wildfire-prone state,” as one X post put it. Perhaps even more upsetting, the locals had had no inkling that this massive venture was about to be dropped on them. “They tried to keep this quiet to avoid public scrutiny, but that won’t stop us!” Gabby Finlayson, the head of Elevate Strategies, a local political consulting firm, posted on May 1.
