Utah just approved an AI data center bigger than Manhattan. You won’t believe how much water it’ll require: ‘We dont want it!’

“Shame!” chanted hundreds of Box Elder County, Utah, residents on May 4. The chants were for three county commissioners who unanimously approved the “Stratos” project—a 40,000-acre artificial intelligence data center campus 2.5 times the size of Manhattan.

The center “will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes,” per The Guardian. That’s roughly 90 to 270 million gallons of water per day, or 33 to 98 billion gallons a year.

Dubbed “Wonder Valley” after “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary’s “Mr. Wonderful” persona, Stratos is part of a reckoning over what AI’s physical infrastructure is doing to public resources.

Stratos AI Data Center Approved in Utah

The project is backed by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA)—a state entity acting as its own “municipality.” Stratos cleared approval five months after O’Leary first met with Governor Spencer Cox in January. People’s Dispatch reports that MIDA grants tax cuts “a private developer could never get on their own.” This includes “80% off property taxes” and energy taxes slashed from 6% to .5%. Many residents call the military designation “legal fiction” engineered to bypass democratic oversight.

Stratos sits near the Great Salt Lake, already in ecological collapse. Developers sought to convert 13,000 acre-feet—roughly 4 billion gallons—of irrigation rights for industrial use. Nearly 4,000 Utahns protested before the application was withdrawn on May 7. Compounding the loss, HB 60, a GOP-backed law effective May 6, stripped state engineers of authority to weigh broader public welfare. “This was what Utah Water leaders had in mind: to make new water uses easier to approve,” Utah Rivers Council director Zach Frankel told Axios.

Additionally, Utah State physics professor Robert Davies warned that “the thermal load from the proposed Stratos project is extreme. He projects 8-12°F of nighttime warming in Hansel Valley. This would include “substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse.” Nonprofit Utah Clean Energy estimates the buildout could spike state CO2 emissions by 50–75%. This will be the case if the project is, as planned, powered by natural gas. Governor Cox has scaled the first phase back to 2,000 acres and 1.5 gigawatts.

A Minority Report?

In Georgia, a Quality Technology Services campus drained nearly 30 million unbilled gallons through a hookup the utility didn’t know existed. UCLA Water Resources Group director Gregory Pierce told Politico that skipping penalties is “unusual” for any utility. In Texas, there is Fermi America’s 5,800-acre “Project Matador” outside Amarillo. It is officially called the “President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus” and joins 400-plus facilities that researchers project may consume 3–9% of Texas’s water by 2040.

Without digging too deep into conspiracy theories, what the centers are ultimately for remains fuzzy at best. There are whispers of data centers’ use for mass surveillance. Developers cite AI, cloud, and “national security.” The Brennan Center for Justice sees more nefarious uses. It warns that the unchecked compute buildout amplifies risks of “law enforcement and intelligence agency use of AI, which can produce erroneous decisions about who to arrest, surveil, label a national security risk, and more.”

Remember that Tom Cruise/Colin Farrell film, “Minority Report”? We might not be that far off from life imitating art.

AllHipHop reached out to Box Elder County and the state of Utah for more information.

@juliandoreypodcastshorts Kevin O’Leary is backing the massive “Stratos” AI data center project in Box Elder County, Utah — a proposed 40,000-acre campus expected to consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, sparking fierce opposition from residents worried about drought, power costs, pollution, and impacts on nearby communities. Thousands of Utahns have protested the project and filed objections over water rights, while state officials have begun imposing new environmental and phased-development requirements amid growing backlash. #kevinoleary #utah #datacenter #stratos #datacenters ♬ Fear, Mystery, Suspense – Beats by Lucky