More than 600 people filled the Box Elder County fairgrounds in Tremonton on May 4, many holding yellow signs that read "No Data Center." The county commission had come to vote on the Stratos project, a hyperscale data center proposed for 40,000 acres of ranchland in Hansel Valley, north of the Great Salt Lake. Chair Tyler Vincent tried to read a prepared statement. The crowd shouted over him. After about half an hour, the three commissioners left the room and finished the meeting in private. Then they approved it.
The vote settled less than it looked like it did. Stratos sits inside the Military Installation Development Authority, a state board whose projects do not pass through ordinary county land-use review. Senate President Stuart Adams chairs that board. Commissioner Lee Perry told KUER that the land was private, already under contract, carrying water rights that had been sold, and unzoned. Had the developers skipped MIDA, Perry said, they could have taken their plans straight to the county building official, who has 21 days to approve or reject on safety grounds alone. The commission's yes vote, by his account, bought guardrails that the county otherwise had no power to impose.
That structure is why the project has survived every attempt to slow it. It is also why the marquee Republican primary of 2026 has turned into a fight over a data center.
Adams was defending the project when its developer folded. He sat with the Standard-Examiner editorial board on June 4, ten days before his first contested primary in more than two decades, explaining why he had ordered Kevin O'Leary to cut the footprint by 75 percent. His campaign manager broke in with word that O'Leary had agreed to all of it, with no attempt to negotiate the size. "He what?" Adams asked. Ten thousand acres was plenty, he told the board. The concession had grown over two weeks. On June 4, Utah News Dispatch reported O'Leary had agreed to cut the project in half, to 20,000 acres. By June 13, the cut had reached three-quarters.
Adams called the campaign against him brutal and the coverage false. The campaign against him is also unusually broad.
He has served in the Legislature since 2002 and as Senate President since 2019, winning his primaries with little trouble for 20 years. This year, two Republicans are running against him in Senate District 7. Stephanie Hollist spent eighteen years as general counsel at Weber State University. Braden Hess is an estate-planning attorney who once drafted bills for the Legislature's own counsel office. At April's convention, the contest came down to Adams and Hess, with Adams taking 54.8 percent of delegates to Hess's 43.2. Hollist lost there and reached the ballot by gathering signatures.
The money runs in odd directions. Hollist has raised close to $90,000, more than $75,000 of it from her father. Hess has raised under $2,000. The biggest sum belongs to an outside group. Make Liberty Win, a national libertarian PAC that has gone after legislative leaders in four other states, is spending $100,000 against Adams, with mailers that portray him as a pickpocket, a magician, and a clown. A separate progressive postcard campaign has drawn a warning that it may run afoul of state election law. Some of the discontent predates Stratos. Adams drew criticism last year over a 2024 law, inspired by his granddaughter's criminal case, that lowered the penalty for 18-year-old students in noncoercive sexual contact with 13-year-olds. The law was not retroactive, and Adams did not invoke the personal connection while it moved.
The data center gave all of it a single object. MIDA can issue bonds, sign development agreements, and steer public financing into private projects, and its board approved the Stratos Project Area on April 24. The county followed on May 4 with two resolutions. Resolution 26-11 granted the county's consent to include the land in MIDA's project area. Resolution 26-12 authorized an interlocal agreement that sets 10 project standards, including valid water rights, a cap of 150 hotel rooms, and a ban on permanent residences.
Seven days after the MIDA vote, money arrived. On May 1, five donors with business before MIDA deposited $135,000 into Adams's political action committee. Utah Political Watch reported the five checks were the largest in the PAC's six-year history and nearly doubled its cash on hand. They came from Jacobsen Construction, Clawson General Contracting, the Aldous and Barnett families, and Copper Key Electrical Solutions, each tied to MIDA work at Deer Valley, Jordanelle, or the authority's Wasatch County projects. None of the five appears connected to the O'Leary deal, and Utah Political Watch found no evidence linking the Stratos approval to the donations. What the record shows is the timing, the figures, and that the man who chairs the authority overseeing these companies' projects collected the largest donations of his political career from them a week after a high-profile vote.
The donations now sit at the center of a lawsuit. On June 3, Alliance for a Better Utah and five Box Elder residents sued MIDA, Adams, Senator Jerry Stevenson, and the county commission in Third District Court. The complaint runs to ten claims. At its center is the argument that MIDA places authority over health, safety, taxation, and land use in an unelected board, cutting off the referendum rights the Utah Constitution gives voters. The plaintiffs also contend that parts of the MIDA Act are unconstitutional, that Adams and Stevenson cannot sit on the board while serving as legislators, and that the $135,000 breached Adams's duty as a board member. They want the project voided, the two senators removed from MIDA, and the money returned.
A second suit landed the same day in First District Court in Brigham City. Residents organized as the Box Elder Accountability Referendum had tried to put resolutions 26-11 and 26-12 on the November ballot. County Attorney Stephen Hadfield rejected the applications, ruling the resolutions administrative rather than legislative and therefore not subject to referendum. "Because I am obligated to interpret and uphold the law," he wrote, "I am legally bound to reject the applications." The group's appeal names the commission, the county attorney, the clerk, and the auditor, argues the resolutions carried the force of law, and alleges Hadfield ruled as counsel loyal to his client. "We told you all this fight isn't over," organizer Brigette Cottam said.
The face of that fight is Brenna Williams, who paused on a Salt Lake City stage in May to steady herself as she described what the project could do to the Great Salt Lake, to a bird refuge, to grandchildren with asthma, to the cows and the bees of a rural county. She said she had fifteen reasons the data center should not be built.
The county's own answer cannot reach the project. On June 10, the commission passed Ordinance 654, a 180-day moratorium on new data center applications. Stratos is exempt, by the county's own explanation, because MIDA developments skip the standard local approval the moratorium governs. The pause covers every project that has not yet arrived. It does not cover the one that prompted it. "After the fact, it feels like you're pushing the barn door closed after the horses are out," resident Aurellia Sanders told the commission. Longtime resident Shane Jenkins answered that commissioners are elected to make hard decisions.
On June 23, three races on the Box Elder ballot turn on Stratos. Adams is the marquee. Commissioners Perry and Boyd Bingham, who both voted for the resolutions, face primary challengers; Vincent, the third yes vote, is not on the ballot this year. A poll commissioned by Stewardship Utah and the referendum group found that 71 percent of county voters opposed the project, and about three-quarters were unhappy with how the commission handled it.
Adams says the fight is finished. The footprint is down to 10,000 acres. The public process he demanded has begun. He is, in his own words, at the top of his game. The land in Hansel Valley is still private, still unzoned, still ranching ground.
