Kevin O'Leary believes his 10,000-acre data center can be 'beautiful'

The Stratos project would be a 7.5-gigawatt data center on 10,000 acres of cattle-grazing land north of the Great Salt Lake, potentially making it the largest in the world. Kevin O’Leary, through O’Leary Digital, links its scale to hyperscaler competition for AI dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. On May 4, Box Elder County Commission granted initial approval, triggering backlash in the Salt Lake City area. Critics worry about energy use, land impacts, and potential water drainage from the Great Salt Lake. O’Leary says the facility would generate its own energy and use closed-loop cooling without drawing lake water, and he disputes reports claiming a 40,000-acre data center by stating the site is 40,000 acres but the data center footprint is 10,000 acres.

""They're all going to be built like this because the economics are so brutal, you need scale," he says."

""We're not building a 40,000-acre data center. Nobody is. That's ludicrous. We're not taking water from the Great Salt Lake. We are not taking energy from the grid in Utah. That's all fiction," he says."

Read at Fast Company