The Stratos Project in Utah is being covered as a local fight over land and water. It is actually a preview of a much larger conflict that will land in many more places over the next few years.
Here is the basic situation. Kevin O'Leary's company, O'Leary Digital, wants to build a data center campus on 40,000 acres of rural Utah land, powered entirely by natural gas, consuming up to 9 gigawatts of electricity at full capacity. That is roughly double what the entire state of Utah uses today. The project was approved in May 2026 by a three-person county commission, in a session that became so chaotic the commissioners moved to a private room to hold the vote while over a thousand protesters watched through a livestream.
The approval was made possible by routing the project through a Utah state body called the Military Installation Development Authority, which was originally created in 2007 to generate funding for Hill Air Force Base. It functions essentially as its own local government, fast-tracking development and bypassing normal public planning processes. Residents argue this is a legal fiction being used to ram through a massive private investment. Commissioners argue that without their involvement, the project could proceed anyway, but without the negotiated protections they secured.
On paper, the project promises around 2,000 permanent jobs and up to $108 million in annual revenue for Box Elder County once fully built. Those are real numbers for a rural area. But Utah Clean Energy estimates that at full build-out, the natural gas plants powering the facility would increase Utah's total carbon emissions by 55 percent and require 16.6 billion gallons of water per year to operate the gas turbines. That is the equivalent of filling 25,000 Olympic swimming pools annually, in a state where 100 percent of the population is currently living under drought conditions and reservoirs are sitting at roughly 60 percent capacity.
The Great Salt Lake, which sits nearby and has already fallen 22 feet since 1986, is the specific environmental flashpoint. Developers say the cooling system will use a closed loop that recycles water and actually sends cleaner water back toward the lake. Conservationists do not trust those claims, in part because Utah state law still allows actual water use figures from data centers to be kept confidential.
What gives this story reach beyond Utah is the pattern it fits into. This is Kevin O'Leary's second attempt at this same kind of project. His Alberta proposal, called Wonder Valley, targets 7.5 gigawatts and was announced in late 2024. It was supposed to break ground in 2026 with the first phase operating by 2027. Construction has not started. It is now not expected to begin until 2028, and no major technology company has signed a long-term contract with the project. The plan is to build first and find tenants later, which is an unusual way to finance something of this scale.
Both projects are also being approved without full environmental reviews. Alberta's government formally exempted Wonder Valley from a provincial environmental assessment. The Utah project still has no approved permits from environmental agencies, and the state Department of Environmental Quality confirms no applications have even been submitted yet.
The broader picture for anyone watching this space: data centers accounted for about half of all electricity demand growth in the US last year. US data center electricity demand is projected to nearly double between 2025 and 2028. Since 2022, nearly two thirds of new US data centers have been sited in high water-stress areas. And community resistance is no longer scattered. There are now 268 organized opposition groups across 37 states, and between just four months last year, opposition blocked or delayed close to $100 billion in projects.
For businesses in energy-intensive industries, water-dependent operations, or rural supply chains, this infrastructure build-out is directly relevant. Electricity prices in areas heavily concentrated with data centers have risen sharply. Land use conflicts are spreading. And the regulatory frameworks governing where these facilities go, how much water they can take, and who pays for the grid upgrades are still being written.
The Utah fight is loud, but the quieter version of this same dynamic is already underway in dozens of places. Most communities will not have a thousand people show up to a county fairgrounds.