Utah just approved a data center so massive it would more than double the state's entire electricity consumption. The Military Installation Development Authority greenlit O'Leary Digital's "Stratos" project, a 9 gigawatt off-grid campus that would run on natural gas rather than pulling from the existing grid. Kevin O'Leary's company is pitching the facility to hyperscale cloud operators with hefty tax incentives. No tenants have signed on yet.
Here's the problem. O'Leary Digital is a property management firm with no track record building data centers. Even experienced contractors struggle at this scale.
A newcomer taking on something many times larger is a gamble.
Then there's water. A 9 GW campus needs massive cooling, and Utah is an arid state already dealing with water scarcity. Under Utah's "first in time, first in right" water rights system, O'Leary Digital would need to buy existing rights from current users, probably agricultural or municipal ones. Traditional evaporative cooling won't work at this scale, forcing the project toward pricier alternatives like closed-loop systems or liquid cooling.
The Truland Group, an established electrical contractor, went bankrupt in 2014 from cost overruns while working on the NSA's Utah data center. That was a fraction of Stratos's planned capacity.