Inside our months-long investigation into Kevin O'Leary's Utah data center debacle

This interview from The Verge's Decoder podcast features features writer Josh Dzieza discussing his months-long investigation into Kevin O'Leary's Stratos project — a planned 40,000-acre, nine-gigawatt AI data center campus in Utah known as Wonder Valley. The project was routed through MIDA (Military Installation Development Authority), a state agency with the power to override local land use, and local county officials were not informed until after MIDA had already approved it. When residents of Box Elder County discovered the project, they mounted fierce bipartisan opposition that united environmental activists, conservative groups, and local residents. The backlash proved politically devastating — two county commissioners and Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams lost their seats over the controversy. O'Leary's attempt to politicize opposition by calling critics "Chinese spies" on Fox News backfired, resulting in a defamation lawsuit and on-air apologies. The project has stalled due to litigation over a referendum to repeal county consent. Dzieza also contextualizes the incident within the broader AI infrastructure boom, explaining how hyperscalers' race for artificial general intelligence has created a speculative land development ecosystem where speed overrides community input, and how local democracy is proving to be one obstacle the tech industry cannot spend its way out of.

(Source：The Verge)