On May 4, the three commissioners of Box Elder County left the room to take their vote. Roughly 1,100 people had packed the fine arts building at the county fairgrounds in Tremonton, and as the meeting turned rowdy, the commissioners retreated to a smaller room and broadcast the proceedings onto a screen for the crowd to watch. The two resolutions were passed unanimously. The county had just consented to roughly 40,000 acres of Hansel Valley for the Stratos Project, a data center campus backed by the "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary and sold to the county as a matter of national security. "Cowards," some in the audience yelled.
The anger was loud. By the rules that govern the project, it may not count for much.
Stratos runs through the Utah Military Installation Development Authority, a state entity built to promote defense-linked development. MIDA's framework includes a feature most Utahns had never heard of until this spring: once a local government consents to a project area, that consent cannot be withdrawn. A lawsuit filed last month by Alliance for a Better Utah and five Box Elder residents argues the mechanism is unconstitutional, because it cuts off the referendum power the state constitution reserves to citizens. The authority is chaired by Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who voted to advance the Stratos project area as a MIDA board member in April, months before he started asking the public to trust the process. Commissioners, for their part, said they had used their brief window to write guardrails into the interlocal agreement, among them noise and building-height limits, dark-sky compliance, and a seat for a local landowner on the project's review board.
The revolt built through May, and it built on dry ground. On May 21, Gov. Spencer Cox declared a statewide drought emergency driven by the lowest snowpack on record, with all 29 counties in severe drought, and told residents to conserve. "We can't control the weather, but we can control the tap," he said. To the people organizing against Stratos, the message did not square with the project their leaders were advancing. One resident planted yard signs reading, "This home identifies as a data center and will use whatever amount of water it wants." Caroline Gleich, a Park City environmentalist who ran against Sen. John Curtis in 2024, put it to Roll Call this way: the governor tells everyone to pray for snow, then partners with O'Leary to fast-track a data center under the banner of national security.
The figures behind the project explain the alarm. The full buildout was expected to draw as much as 9 gigawatts of generating capacity, more than twice the electricity the entire state uses in a year, supplied by a natural gas plant the campus would build for itself. Developers were seeking 13,000 acre-feet of groundwater rights. Investors say the cooling runs closed-loop and will not deepen the drought. Residents, scientists, and a growing roster of politicians have said they cannot verify that, because the numbers keep changing and the documents are not public.
By June, Adams had moved from the project's champion to its loudest critic. On June 1, he demanded that O'Leary shrink the footprint by 75 percent, from 40,000 acres to roughly 10,000, treat and return any excess water to the Great Salt Lake at the developer's expense, sign a land-conservation agreement with the state, install heat-capture technology, and publish every future permit on a public website. Six conditions in all. The letter itself has not been released. What exists is Adams's press release.
O'Leary's first answer was contempt. He told ABC4 he assumed the 75 percent was a typo and that the real figure must be 25, and he suggested Adams had written the letter only because a primary was bearing down. Within days, he folded. According to reporting by The Leader, whose request for the letter remains pending, O'Leary's reply offered to remove 19,430 acres near Locomotive Springs and another 620 near Interstate 84, cutting the project area not by three-quarters but roughly in half, to about 20,000 acres.
Both men called it progress, and the gap between what was asked and what was given is where the dispute now lives. O'Leary says the developed land falls by 75 percent, while the overall area falls by 50 percent, his argument being that the original 40,000 acres was always a project area with only about 10,000 acres of actual data center within it. Adams's letter used "project area." O'Leary's reply leans on "developed land." The 75 percent the public keeps hearing belongs to whichever definition the speaker prefers. Brenna Williams of the Box Elder Accountability Referendum group was unmoved by either. "The fact that they cut the land area doesn't mean that it's going to change the impact," she said. "The county's just too vulnerable for a development of this scale."
He did concede one thing without an asterisk. "The two of us really screwed this up initially," O'Leary said of himself and Adams, in a second sit-down with ABC4. "We made some assumptions that were just not right. We pissed off a lot of people, and that's not the way I do business."
The timing is hard to separate from the politics. Adams faces two Republican challengers in the June 23 primary, and his demand letter went out the week ballots landed in mailboxes. Stephanie Hollist, a Fruit Heights attorney running against him, called it too little, too late, and urged a full pause until the studies are done. Braden Hess, his other opponent, called the letter misguided and said it is not the government's job to constrain a private business. Adams says he will stay with the issue regardless of how the race ends.
Washington has been content to let Utah carry this alone. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the Politico Energy Summit that no agency in Washington should pretend to know a Georgia or Arizona community better than the people who live there. Curtis, whose own state is the test case, calls Stratos "a local issue" and says he still lacks basic facts about its water use. A few bills have surfaced without moving: the GRID Act from Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, which would force new data centers onto power separate from the grid; a disclosure bill from Sen. Richard Durbin; a construction moratorium from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a drinking-water bill that Curtis cosponsored with Sens. Jacky Rosen and Lisa Blunt Rochester, which does not mention data centers at all. Hawley, one of the few Republicans pressing for federal rules, still grounds them in local consent, writing in a Free Press op-ed that families are watching the construction trucks roll in and asking whether their bills will double and their wells will run dry.
Durbin offered the line that ought to worry anyone counting on Congress. State and local governments, he said, are not going to wait. Box Elder County already didn't. Its commission consented, that consent locked, and the residents who shouted from the fairgrounds floor on May 4 are now in district court, arguing for the right to a vote the process took away before they ever reached the ballot.
