Inside our months-long investigation into Kevin O’Leary’s Utah data center debacle — SkimNews
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- Kevin O'Leary announced plans for a 40,000-acre AI data center campus in Utah — dubbed Stratos or Wonder Valley — that would have drawn nine gigawatts of power, more than double the state's average usage
- MIDA (Military Installation Development Authority), a state agency originally meant for military property redevelopment, approved the project before Utah's county government was even notified — the county found out roughly a month before O'Leary went public in late April
- O'Leary called his critics 'Chinese spies' during a Fox News appearance, triggering a defamation lawsuit and forcing Fox News to apologize on air
- Local residents, already primed by a wave of data center backlash content on social media, mounted furious opposition after learning of the project at coffee shops and on Facebook, creating a 'political firestorm' that stopped Stratos 'in its tracks'
- Josh Dzieza drew direct parallels to the failed Foxconn LCD factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin — and noted that Foxconn's abandoned Wisconsin land is now being used for a Microsoft data center, calling it 'maybe the natural end state of all things'
Why it matters: A developer with celebrity access, a sympathetic state agency with override power, and a governor's office on speed-dial still couldn't get a project past a county commission and its angry constituents — demonstrating that local democracy is becoming the binding constraint on the AI infrastructure boom, regardless of how much capital or political muscle is deployed at the top.
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