A planning commission vote in Box Elder County, Utah, concerning a proposed hyperscale data center campus backed by Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary has been postponed, amidst claims by local officials that they were blindsided by the project's scope and state involvement.
According to reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune, county commissioners postponed the meeting due to concerns that Utah's Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) and state officials were not clear about the size of the project and the extent of state and county involvement.
“The thing that’s so frustrating for us, for commissioners, is all of a sudden, we’re brought this in the last hour, and we’re expected to hurry,” commission chair Tyler Vincent said in the meeting. Due to this, local officials indicated that they required further time to determine the true impacts of the project. The next meeting to vote on the project has subsequently been scheduled for May 4, with county officials moving the meeting to the Box Elder County Fairgrounds Fine Arts Building to accommodate a larger crowd.
The project has already gained approval from MIDA, which has been granted the authority by the state to oversee large-scale developments. However, for the project to go ahead, it will still require approvals from Box Elder County.
If built, the data center, planned for construction in Box Elder County, could have a capacity of up to 9GW of power, which is more than double the state's current electricity use, which stands at 4GW.
This has created significant concerns amongst locals, with many arguing that if realized, the project could have significant environmental impacts. Another concern voiced is the tax breaks MIDA has offered to attract hyperscale customers to the state, promising to cut the energy use tax from its standard six percent to 0.5 percent and rebate 80 percent of the property tax revenue generated by the development back to O'Leary Digital.
Dubbed Stratos, the project is being developed by O'Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of Kevin O'Leary. The data center would sit on 40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military and state-owned property. According to the company, the project would be developed in phases, with phase one seeking to develop 3GW of generation capacity.
The power capacity would be made up of onsite natural gas generation through a direct connection to the 680-mile (1,940km) Ruby interstate natural gas pipeline. As a result, MIDA executive director Paul Morris claimed to county commissioners that the facility “will not take one electron” from the grid, and in the future could supply surplus energy back.
O’Leary has framed the development as a matter of national security: "China built 400GW of new power over the last 24 months, and much of it is powering AI data centers," O'Leary told the board, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. "We're in a race with them."
O’Leary, known as Mr. Wonderful on the show, is a property investor and long-time backer of cryptomining and HPC data center operator Bitzero.
DCD spoke to O’Leary earlier this year about Bitzero and the AI revolution. Read here.