How Utah locals fought Kevin O'Leary's AI data center

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Nilay Patel (1:32)

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about Kevin O'Leary's plans to build a massive data center in Utah. The idea was to build the largest data center in the world, a 40,000 acre AI campus with more than nine gigawatts of power, more than double the average power usage of the entire state of Utah. The project is technically called Stratos, but it's more prominently known as Wonder Valley, a reference to O'Leary's nickname on Shark Tank. Josh has spent months reporting on this project. It's fair to say Wonder Valley has completely upended Utah's politics. What Josh found throughout the course of his reporting was that the way this data center came together, how it was planned, how it was announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the dark, ultimately created a political firestorm so severe, it stopped Stratos in its tracks. Now, the details of what happened with Stratos in the River Valley are obviously fascinating, but the story itself is also a larger look at the AI industry's infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that build out, and how the tech industry is running into the one obstacle it can't seem to buy its way out of, local democracy. The Verge is Josh Dzieza on the Utah data center disaster. Here we go.

Josh Dzieza here, a features writer here at The Verge. Welcome to Decoder.

Josh Dzieza (2:56)

Thanks for having me.

Nilay Patel (2:57)

I'm very excited to talk to you.

For people who don't know, Josh has one of the hardest jobs at the entire Verge. You just disappear for long periods of time, and then you come back with 15,000 word homeruns, which is enormous amount of pressure, but you keep hitting them.

Josh Dzieza (3:13)

It's a great job. Kevin might say that editing those 15,000 words is the hardest job, but down to something manageable.

Nilay Patel (3:21)

Yeah.

Kevin is our features editor who works very closely with Josh. The homerun we sent you out to get this time was the story of what happened with Kevin O'Leary in Utah where he promised to build what was going to be the biggest data center in the world. He was all over the news talking about building the biggest data center in the world that was called Stratos. He was calling the entire development Wonder Valley.

This thing fell apart in a bunch of anger from the local community. There's a defamation lawsuit because O'Leary referred to all of his critics as Chinese spies on Fox News. Fox News had to apologize on the air. When you started reporting on this story, it struck me that there would be some similarities to the huge feature you wrote about the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, my hometown, where President Trump announced that Foxconn was going to build a massive LCD factory in the middle of Wisconsin. There would be 13,000 jobs, and none of that happened. And actually, what's funny about that is it's now that land is being used for a Microsoft data center, which is just maybe the natural end state of all things. Walk me through those just at a high level. What did this feel like to report?

Josh Dzieza (4:29)

I did not expect this to feel so similar to Foxconn initially, because unlike the Foxconn project, the data center build out is real, and at least theoretically can make sense in many cases. Like these things are actually getting built, unlike an LCD tab in the middle of Wisconsin.