After trading letters about the proposed Box Elder County data center, the acreage of the massive project has been cut in half. Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary’s concession was a response to demands from Utah Senate President Stuart Adams.
Those demands came after significant public pushback to the data center — not only concerns about the proposal, but also about how Adams and other state leaders handled the situation.
As it was originally pitched and approved, the Stratos Project would’ve sat on 40,000 acres north of the Great Salt Lake. That’s a little smaller than the total area of the city of St. George.
“We will agree to remove 19,430 acres in and around the Locomotive Springs area in recognition of the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area,” O’Leary wrote in a June 4 letter.
He added that another 620 acres would be removed from another area. Most of the remaining project area, O’Leary said, would be “open space” — which renderings on his company’s website also state. A senate spokesperson said that by dedicating most of the remaining project area to open space, O’Leary “has limited the developable project area to be less than the 10,000 acres demanded by President Adams.”
O’Leary wrote that the “practical effect is that the project's built industrial and data-center footprint is brought in line with the scale your letter contemplates, while the broader expansion area remains available to anchor advanced manufacturing and defense-industrial uses over a 30-year horizon — the kind of cluster that builds on Northrop Grumman, Nucor, and Utah's industrial base.”
Adams chairs the board of the Military Installation Development Authority, the agency backing the project.
He sees O’Leary’s response as a win and said O’Leary agreed to all of his demands. His letter also asked that excess water be sent to Great Salt Lake, as well as specific commitments to conserve land and use technology to minimize the project’s environmental impact. There will also be a public website created to improve transparency.
Adams called the concerns raised about the project valid, and said protecting the state’s water and the Great Salt Lake is one of his top priorities.
“The good news for Utahns is that this process is still in its earliest stages — no approvals or permits have been applied for, let alone issued,” Adams said in a statement. “There must be written commitments in place, and the proposal must undergo a full permitting and environmental review process, just like any other development project in Utah.”
O’Leary’s letter claimed that “Much of the alarm surrounding this project has been based on incorrect assumptions and facts about land use, water use, heat dispersion, air quality, and project timeline that does not reflect reality.”
After the Military Installation Development Authority moved the project forward in April, the Box Elder County Commission ultimately signed off in May after significant outcry. One commissioner told KUER the three-person body felt their hands were tied.
Project opponents unsuccessfully tried to get the issue to voters through a referendum. The county’s attorney rejected the application for it. Now, the group, Box Elder Accountability Referendum, is suing to get the data center on the ballot.
