On May 4, Box Elder County commissioners voted unanimously to advance the Stratos Project, a $100 billion AI data center on a 40,000-acre stretch of rural Utah roughly the size of Washington, D.C. Hundreds of residents packed the county fairgrounds. They chanted “shame” and “people over profits.” The commissioners eventually left for a private room and approved the project over a livestream while attendees watched. Commissioner Boyd Bingham told the crowd, “For hell’s sakes, grow up. This is beyond a joke.”
The developer, West GenCo, is a joint venture with O’Leary Digital Limited that was incorporated in February. The project would draw 9 gigawatts, more than twice what the entire state of Utah currently consumes in a year, according to CNN’s reporting. Cooling water would come from the same basin feeding the Great Salt Lake, which has dropped 22 feet since 1986.
The argument that wasn’t technical
Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank investor backing the project, framed the opposition in geopolitical terms. “At the end of the day, who would want us to stop building our electrical grid?” he asked. “Which adversary would want that? There’s only one: it’s China.” He also claimed, without producing evidence, that 90% of the protesters had been bused in from out of state. Salt Lake Tribune reporting disputed that claim.
What the public record does not contain is the specification a person might expect from a $100 billion compute build. There is no published estimate of how many GPUs the facility would host, which model classes it would serve, what power usage effectiveness it would target, or which cooling architecture it would deploy. Samantha Hawkins of Grow the Flow Utah noted that “there’s no publicly available hydrologic analysis or independent review” to back the project’s water claims. Kevin Perry, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Utah, estimated the facility would raise Utah’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than 50%.
A 9 GW request is a request the size of a small country. The justification on the record is that an adversary would prefer the project not happen.
What “for AI” is doing in the sentence
The phrase “AI data center” has started functioning as a permit. In Box Elder’s hearings, it served as the reason an environmental review felt less urgent, the reason a community of fewer than 60,000 people should accept industrial load on the scale of the rest of Utah combined, and the reason a company two months old should be trusted with that load. The phrase did not have to specify which models, which training runs, or which customers. It was the brand name on the line item.
Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State, gave the cleanest framing of the trade. “This is a private enterprise that is coming in to extract from our natural wealth and pipe it out of the state,” he said. The compute will not stay in Box Elder. The bill, in water and air, will.
A small group of voters has now filed a referendum application. They need more than 5,000 signatures inside the county’s 20-day review window to put the approval on the November ballot. The petition is the first request anyone has made that the project’s developers actually quantify what they are asking for.