The Stratos Project is a proposed $100 billion data center complex in Box Elder County, Utah, split across three parcels and targeting 9 gigawatts of capacity for AI training, cloud computing, and national security workloads. The developer is West GenCo, which formed a joint venture with O'Leary Digital in February 2026. Kevin O'Leary met with Utah Governor Spencer Cox, House Speaker Mike Schultz, and Senate President Stuart Adams in late 2025 to discuss the project. The Box Elder County Commission unanimously voted to advance the project last week while a crowd gathered outside to protest and demand information.
At full buildout, Stratos would generate $108 million in annual revenues for the region. The first gigawatt of capacity is targeted to be operational within two years. Only 2 percent of Box Elder County residents backed the project in community input processes before the commission vote. A small group of residents has since filed a referendum application seeking to put a ballot measure to the voters.
West GenCo submitted an initial water rights application to Utah state authorities. Thousands of Utahns filed protests against it. The application was withdrawn. A new application has now been submitted, and it has already drawn dozens of additional protests before the formal review process has advanced.
The location matters for this specific reason: Box Elder County sits adjacent to the Great Salt Lake. The lake has been losing surface area and volume for decades, a consequence of upstream water diversion compounded by drought. A 9-gigawatt data center complex in that watershed represents a new consumptive water draw of significant scale entering a system that environmentalists and the Utah state government have both identified as in crisis. Regulators have not yet addressed the heat island risk from the facility's thermal exhaust near the lake. At 9 gigawatts, even a liquid-cooled facility with dry coolers produces a substantial thermal plume.
9 gigawatts is not a data center. It is a small power grid's worth of computing infrastructure concentrated on a single site. For comparison, xAI's Colossus 1 in Memphis draws 300 megawatts. Stratos at full build is 30 Colossus facilities in one county. The cooling architecture decisions for a facility at that scale are not standard operator choices. They are engineering problems that have not been solved at this density in a water-stressed inland location.
The original project framing described the energy requirement as initially needing 100 percent natural gas generation. Renewable energy commitments were later introduced in public communications. Whether 9 gigawatts of firm power is achievable in Box Elder County without a dedicated gas plant, and what the water consumption of that plant's cooling system would be, are questions the water rights protest process is designed to force the developer to answer on record. That process is ongoing.
The Wyoming and Utah situations share the same structure: developers making low-water-draw claims to state authorities that have limited technical capacity to audit them, in watersheds where the margin for error is thin. The difference is scale. Wyoming is managing hundreds of megawatts. Utah is being asked to permit nine thousand.