Kevin O’Leary’s Utah Data Center Halted After Political Firestorm, Verge Investigation Finds

The Verge features writer Josh Dzieza, who spent months reporting on the project, told the publication’s Decoder podcast that the way the data center came together—how it was planned, announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the dark—created a political firestorm severe enough to stop Stratos in its tracks. The fight upended Utah politics, The Verge said.

For most people in the county and the state, the first public signal came in late April, when O’Leary began talking about the project as an enormous data center he was building in Utah called Wonder Valley or Stratos. Dzieza said that several months earlier, only about a dozen people knew about the plan: a handful of property owners in a remote valley, some people in the state government at one agency and a few real estate developers. O’Leary came out and said, 'We’re building this giant thing,' Dzieza said, and that was the first time most people in the county and the state had heard about it.

O’Leary promoted the development as the biggest data center in the world, and its scale drew attention. The Verge reported that Wonder Valley was planned as a 40,000-acre AI campus with nine gigawatts of power, more than double the average power usage of Utah. But the project fell apart amid anger from the local community. A defamation lawsuit followed after O’Leary referred to all of his critics as Chinese spies on Fox News, and Fox News had to apologize on the air, according to the report.

Dzieza compared the episode to the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, where President Trump announced a massive LCD factory and 13,000 jobs were promised. None of that happened, and the land is now being used for a Microsoft data center, he said. Unlike an LCD fabrication plant in the middle of Wisconsin, Dzieza said, the data center buildout is real and can make sense in many cases. But he found more parallels than expected, including local officials, planning meetings and angry residents. He also said there are many data centers on paper and a large amount of speculation, with projects that may be real or may not be, making them harder to assess than he had realized before reporting on the industry.

The Verge investigation frames Wonder Valley as more than a single failed project. It is a view into the AI industry’s infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that buildout, and how the tech industry is running into an obstacle it cannot seem to spend its way out of: local democracy. The report says the way the project was planned, announced and approved, and the secrecy surrounding it, helped produce the political opposition that ultimately stopped it.