Today I’m talking with 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 world’s biggest data center — a 40,000-acre AI campus with nine gigawatts of power, or 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, and it’s fair to say Wonder Valley has completely upended Utah 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 Wonder Valley are obviously fascinating. But the story is also a larger look at the AI industry’s infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that buildout, and how the tech industry is running into the one obstacle it can’t seem to spend its way out of: local…
Oka…
