US News Kevin O’Leary believes his 10,000-acre data center can be ‘beautiful’

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If it ever gets built, the 7.5-gigawatt Stratos data center project in Utah would dwarf the artificial intelligence infrastructure that’s been built to date. Covering 10,000 acres of cattle-grazing land north of the Great Salt Lake, it would arguably be the largest data center in the world.

That has many people in Utah concerned.

The developer behind the project is Kevin O’Leary, the real estate investor familiar to many as a star of the ABC television show Shark Tank (and also the villain in the 2025 movie Marty Supreme). He says the increasingly competitive race for AI dominance among hyperscaler companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft is paving the way for giant data centers like Stratos to become the new normal.

“They’re all going to be built like this because the economics are so brutal, you need scale,” he says.

 
The anti-AI crowd is going to lose. The benefits are too great to ignore this, and if the US doesn't step up, China will, which will be bad for the economic outlook for the US in the mid- and long-term.

That said, there's definitely room here to make some sensible changes to do these buildouts responsibly to avoid the most common concerns. The hysteria is unwarranted, but there are definite concerns around power and water usage that are addressable. This particular project notes the following:

The cooling system will have a closed-loop configuration that re-uses water rather than need constant refilling.

Stratos will produce all of the power it needs on site using natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline.
Click to expand...

That's a good start and will need to be verified. If things like this are handled responsibly, then I have no problem with these large datacenter projects. I believe it'll benefit humanity in the long term. Short term, we may see some disruptions, but that's been true throughout history.
 
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