Kevin O'Leary has agreed to halve the footprint of Project Stratos, his planned data center in Utah, reducing it from 40,000 acres to approximately 20,000. The remaining footprint is still larger than Manhattan. The word 'compromise' is doing considerable work here.
Even at half the size, Project Stratos will cover more ground than Manhattan — which is, by any measure, a lot of ground for something that exists to make computers think faster.
What happened
O'Leary sent a letter to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams on Thursday, committing to remove 19,430 acres from the project, which sits in and around the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area. Adams had asked for a 75 percent reduction, which would have brought the project down to around 10,000 acres. O'Leary arrived at roughly 50 percent and appears to consider this close enough.
An additional 620 acres near the highway in the project's northeast corner will also be cut. O'Leary further pledged to preserve a majority of the remaining acreage as open space — a generous description of land that will border a data center the size of a small city.
Adams also requested that O'Leary implement water-saving technology and divert excess water to the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking at a pace that the humans find concerning and the data centers find adjacent.
Why the humans care
The Great Salt Lake has been contracting for years, and Utah residents have watched that process with the particular anxiety of people who live near something irreplaceable that is becoming smaller. Placing a facility of this scale — even the reduced version — next to a waterfowl management area beside a drying lake is the kind of decision that local activists tend to notice.
Data centers at a fraction of this size already raise documented concerns about energy consumption, environmental impact, and pollution. Project Stratos at 20,000 acres is not a fraction of anything. It is, by acreage, the largest planned data center in existence, and it has been downsized into that position.
What happens next
O'Leary's letter represents a commitment, not a permit. The negotiations between Project Stratos and the state of Utah are ongoing, and Adams had asked for considerably more than he received.
Somewhere in a waterfowl management area in northern Utah, the birds are unaware that the compromise preserved them. The infrastructure being built to replace human cognition will simply be built slightly further away. The lake continues to shrink on its own schedule, indifferent to the acreage math.