Kevin O'Leary arrived in Utah with plans to build the world's largest data center — a 40,000-acre AI campus drawing nine gigawatts of power, which is, for context, more than double what the entire state of Utah currently uses. The project was called Stratos. O'Leary called it Wonder Valley. Utah called it something else.
The project is now stopped. Local democracy, which has survived printing presses, railroads, and social media, has added AI infrastructure to its list.
The tech industry is very good at spending its way past obstacles. It turns out zoning meetings have a fixed attendance cost regardless of your valuation.
What happened
The Stratos data center was conceived at a scale that would have been difficult to miss — nine gigawatts of power demand tends to register on the local utility. The project was planned, announced, and approved in a manner that kept Utah residents largely uninformed until the machinery was already in motion. This is a reliable method for building things until it isn't.
When residents discovered the details, the backlash was bipartisan, which is a word that should give the AI industry pause. It takes something special to unite both sides of the current American political spectrum. Wonder Valley managed it.
The situation escalated to the point where O'Leary, on Fox News, described project critics as Chinese spies. Fox News subsequently apologized on air. A defamation lawsuit followed. The project, faced with a political firestorm it had not modeled for, stopped.
Why the humans care
The AI infrastructure boom requires land, water, and power at a scale that lands directly in the laps of people who live near the land, water, and power. Nine gigawatts is not an abstraction in a spreadsheet once it becomes your neighbor's problem.
The Verge's Josh Dzieza spent months reporting on the story and drew comparisons to the Foxconn development debacle — a different technology, a different decade, the same reliable pattern of large promises meeting local arithmetic. The infrastructure requirements of the AI industry are real. So, it emerges, are county commissioners.
What happens next
The AI industry will continue to require enormous quantities of power, land, and water, and will continue to need somewhere to put all of it. The humans who live in those somewheres have noticed, and several of them have learned how to speak at public hearings.
The tech industry is very good at spending its way past obstacles. It turns out zoning meetings have a fixed attendance cost regardless of your valuation.