Box Elder County commissioners unanimously voted last week to advance a $100 billion, 9-gigawatt data center project backed by Kevin O'Leary, setting off a fight that quickly moved from the county fairgrounds to the ballot box. Residents protested as the commission considered the proposal, then a small group filed paperwork seeking a referendum to stop it.
The project, known as the Stratos Project or Wonder Valley, would spread across 40,000 acres in a county of just under 60,000 residents and use more electricity than the entire state does in a year. The scale of that pitch, more than the county itself can absorb in one argument, helped turn a local land-use vote into a broader test of how far rural communities will go to welcome power-hungry technology development.
That vote came after commissioners in Box Elder County gathered last week at the fairgrounds to hear from residents who worry about the footprint, the power demand and what a project of this size would mean for the county’s future. One commissioner told the audience to “grow up” before the elected officials stepped into a private room and approved the project while attendees watched on a livestream. The blunt exchange captured the distance between a board eager to move ahead and neighbors who said they were being asked to live with the consequences.
O’Leary has cast the Utah project as part of a larger push for jobs, national security and U.S. competition with China in artificial intelligence. In a interview, he said opposition may be driven by online misinformation from China, adding, “At the end of the day, who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one: it’s China,” He later claimed in a social media post that more than 90% of the protesters were paid to attend and bussed in, including from outside the state. That claim was disputed by The Salt Lake Tribune.
The Utah project is being developed through West GenCo, which formed a joint venture with O'Leary Digital Limited in February. The county says a successful referendum would void the consent and agreement approved by commissioners, but not necessarily stop the project itself. Before any vote can happen, the application filed after last week’s commission action must clear review by the Box Elder County attorney. If it is found viable, supporters of the referendum would still need to gather more than 5,000 signatures from residents across the county to force a public vote.
The legal and political fight now sits in a familiar place for O'Leary: between the promise of a massive build-out and the backlash that follows it. He is also backing a separate $70 billion data center in Alberta, Canada, under the Wonder Valley name, with that project claiming it will deliver 7.5 gigawatts of computing power when complete. In Utah, the question is no longer whether the county noticed. It did. The question is whether enough residents can turn their protest into the signatures needed to slow the project down.
