Inside our months-long investigation into Kevin O’Leary’s Utah data center debacle
Kevin O'Leary's 40,000-acre, nine-gigawatt Utah AI campus, Stratos, stalled after local backlash.
The Verge's Decoder podcast interviews Josh Dzieza about his investigation of Kevin O'Leary's Wonder Valley, also called Stratos, a proposed 40,000-acre AI campus in Utah seeking about nine gigawatts of power. The project advanced through the state's Military Installation Development Authority before most residents knew about it, then drew intense local opposition. O'Leary's televised claim that critics were Chinese spies led Fox News to apologize amid a defamation dispute. The piece frames the collapse as part of bipartisan pushback against the AI data-center buildout.
- Stratos, branded Wonder Valley, proposed nine gigawatts across 40,000 Utah acres.
- Planning ran through Utah's Military Installation Development Authority with little public notice.
- Local backlash and a Fox News defamation controversy stopped the project.
- The report ties the failure to wider resistance to AI data-center construction.
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From the original article
15 min read at theverge.com
Today I’m talking with Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about Kevin O’Leary’s plans to build a massive data center in Utah. The idea was to build the world’s biggest data centers — a 40,000-acre AI campus with nine gigawatts of power, or more than double the average power usage of the entire state of Utah.
By Nilay Patel · theverge.com
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