Kevin O’Leary just agreed to cut his planned Utah data center roughly in half. According to The Verge AI, the Shark Tank investor sent a letter Thursday to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, committing to remove nearly 20,000 acres from Project Stratos, his sprawling compute campus in and around the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area. The retreat comes after sustained pressure from residents, activists, and now state lawmakers.
What happened
- O’Leary will drop 19,430 acres from the original 40,000-acre footprint.
- He’s cutting another 620 acres near the highway in the project’s northeast corner.
- The new footprint lands around 20,000 acres, down from 40,000.
- He promised to “preserve a majority of the remaining acreage as open space.”
The move follows a direct ask from Adams just days earlier. The Verge AI reports that Adams called on O’Leary to slash Project Stratos by 75 percent, which would have shrunk it to roughly 10,000 acres. O’Leary’s letter meets him partway, not all the way.
Why this matters
This is one of the clearest signs yet that local politics can reshape the AI buildout. Data center developers are racing to lock up cheap land and power across the US, often in rural areas with little organized opposition. Utah just showed that opposition can form fast and force real concessions.
Water is the sharper issue here. Adams didn’t only ask for less land. He pushed O’Leary to install technology that minimizes water consumption and to divert excess water to the Great Salt Lake, which keeps shrinking. That’s significant because large data centers can consume enormous volumes of water for cooling, and the Great Salt Lake’s decline is already an environmental flashpoint in the state.
The context
The status quo until now has been simple: announce a massive project, secure incentives, and build. Communities usually learn the details late. Project Stratos flipped that script. Public pressure landed before the foundations did, and a sitting Senate president put a specific number on the table.
Still, smaller doesn’t mean small. What stands out here is the scale even after the cut. At around 20,000 acres, Project Stratos would cover more ground than Manhattan. As The Verge AI notes, data centers a fraction of this size already raise serious concerns over energy use, environmental impact, and pollution. Halving the footprint reduces the land grab, but it doesn’t erase the power and water demands that come with running AI infrastructure at this scale.
What to watch next
- Will Adams accept 50 percent? He asked for a 75 percent cut. O’Leary delivered about half. That gap could mean more negotiation ahead.
- Water commitments. Watch whether O’Leary actually adopts low-water cooling and the Great Salt Lake diversion, or whether those stay aspirational.
- The energy question. A campus this size needs serious power. Where it comes from, and at what cost to the grid and emissions, remains the open question.
- A template for other states. If Utah’s playbook works, expect residents and lawmakers elsewhere to copy it as more mega-projects get announced.
For anyone building, siting, or financing AI infrastructure, the lesson is direct. Land and power are no longer the only constraints. Community consent and water access are becoming gating factors, and they can move a project before a single server rack ships. O’Leary’s concession won’t be the last of its kind.
More details are available at the original report from The Verge AI.