New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved

Utah's Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) on Friday approved a development agreement for a hyperscale data center campus in Box Elder County that could eventually consume 9 GW of power, more than double the state's current average electricity use of roughly 4 GW, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

The project, dubbed Stratos, is being developed by O'Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary, and would span 40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military and state-owned property.

Phase 1 alone calls for approximately 3 GW of generation capacity. At full buildout, the campus would reach 9 GW, all produced on-site through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its route from Wyoming to Oregon. MIDA executive director Paul Morris told county commissioners that the facility “will not take one electron” from the existing grid and could eventually feed surplus power back into it.

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The off-grid approach places Stratos alongside a growing list of AI-era data center projects that are building their own power generation rather than waiting years for utility connections. SoftBank's planned Ohio campus targets 10 GW using a fleet of gas turbines, while Meta recently committed to funding seven new natural gas plants for a 7 GW facility in Louisiana. O'Leary's project would sit squarely between the two in terms of its raw capacity.

O'Leary appeared at the MDIA board meeting by video and made the case that the project is needed in response to China's burgeoning AI infrastructure investments. "China built 400 gigawatts 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."

To attract hyperscale cloud operators, MIDA cut the project's energy use tax from its standard 6% to 0.5% and agreed to rebate 80% of the property tax revenue generated by the development back to O'Leary Digital. Even at those reduced rates, Morris projected $30 million annually for Box Elder County during the initial phase and over $100 million once the campus reaches full capacity.

MIDA projects that state sales tax receipts from the data centers alone would reach $250 million per year, and the development is also expected to create 2,000 permanent jobs in the county following construction.

The county commission postponed its final vote on the project from Friday until today, and, as of the time of writing, no hyperscaler tenant(s) have been publicly named. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the three largest operators of hyperscale cloud infrastructure in the U.S., with Meta and Apple close behind. O'Leary Digital is also developing a companion Wonder Valley campus in Alberta, Canada, announced in 2024, which has not yet broken ground.

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