Meet Stratos: Earth’s Largest and Most Resource-Hungry Data Center

by Tim Leogrande, BSIT, MSCP, Ed.S.

🗓 MAY 21 2026 • 5 MIN 20 SEC READ

The Stratos Hyperscale Data Center is a new $100 billion AI project planned for Hansel Valley, Utah. The facility is a joint venture by the Utah Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA); Canadian billionaire and Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary; and West GenCo LLC, a real estate and investment company. Upon completion, Stratos will span 40,000 acres — an area comparable to the city of Washington, D.C. — making it the largest data center on Earth. Yet the project’s massive size isn’t its most striking feature.

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Utah currently has an average electricity demand of about four gigawatts. Stratos will require an average of nine gigawatts, meaning the facility would consume over twice as much energy as all of the state’s homes, businesses, and factories combined.

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At a board meeting on April 24, MIDA presented designs for the project. The master plan depicts six data center clusters, solar arrays, a “mixed-use innovation district,” and a buffer along the property’s boundary. On May 4, the Box Elder County Commission approved the plans despite strong public opposition. Local residents are now trying to overturn that decision by placing two referendums on the November ballot.

Stratos will be situated 40 miles west of Tremonton, Utah, within the Great Salt Lake watershed. Approximately 6,000 Utahns recently signed a letter to Governor Spencer Cox opposing the project, in part because scientists and environmental organizations warn that the extreme heat it would generate may further damage an already deteriorating ecosystem.

Rob Davies, a physicist at Utah State University, estimates that the total thermal output of Stratos could release heat equivalent to detonating 23 Hiroshima-yield atomic bombs every day and increase overnight temperatures in the area by up to 12 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

"The thermal load from the proposed Stratos project is extreme," Davies said. "There is no way around the physics. This is the energy output of two and a half New York Cities poured into a single confined desert basin — in a watershed that's already in crisis. Of course it will have effects. One of those effects is this: this facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse."

This evaporative effect is likely to both intensify and prolong the region’s frequent droughts and water shortages. The Salt Lake Tribune, citing the project’s own documents, reports that the facility will draw up to 3.3 billion gallons from contracted water rights. And analysis by Utah Clean Energy estimates that the on-site natural gas power plant will consume an additional 16.6 billion gallons of water annually.

In an online FAQ, government supporters of Stratos attempted to address these water-use concerns — but their explanation revealed serious factual inconsistencies. The FAQ repeatedly describes the entire project as a “closed-loop, no water draw” system. That phrase might fairly describe the chiller loop inside the data centers, but it doesn’t apply to the nine gigawatt on-site natural gas power plant that the FAQ says will be built to power the campus. Natural gas turbines also need cooling water — and by discussing only the fluid in the server halls while ignoring the turbines, the FAQ misleadingly paints an incomplete picture of how much water the project will consume.

“Closed-loop” doesn’t mean “zero water consumption.” Even closed-loop systems lose water over time through evaporation, blowdown (draining off mineral-heavy water), and routine maintenance flushing (Myths vs. Reality: Data Centers And Water Usage). The only way to get a truly refill-free closed loop is to use fully dry/air cooling and the FAQ itself says the project uses “a combination of closed-loop chilling and dry cooling,” which is not the same thing. This wording reveals that the chilled-water loop will undoubtably require periodic refilling.

Whether Stratos will ever actually be built remains uncertain. If it is built, the area will experience a drastic increase in CO₂ emissions from its natural gas power plant, as well as persistent light and noise pollution. The project is also going to place significantly more stress on a fragile ecosystem that biologists warn is already nearing ecological collapse.

There are currently about 11,800 data centers worldwide. With 4,184 facilities, the U.S. is home to more than one-third of them. The UK has 515, Germany has 514, and China has 369. In other words, the U.S. already has roughly eight times as many data centers as its closest rival but is still rubber-stamping project proposals.

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Stratos isn’t just another ill-conceived, oversized tech project in the desert. It’s a massive red flag signaling the direction in which modern society is heading: limitless energy consumption paired with collapsing environmental priorities.

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What makes this project especially troubling is that it reframes environmental destruction as an acceptable cost of technological progress. In doing so, it underscores a growing willingness to prioritize speed, scale, and military-industrial ambition over the long-term stewardship of the landscapes and resources that sustain us.

Even if Stratos is never constructed, the fact that it is being considered at all should spark a larger conversation about what we are willing to sacrifice for technology that not only fails to preserve natural resources but brazenly squanders them.

I am as excited about the potential applications of AI as anyone. But if the price of building it is a depleted watershed, a scorched valley, endangered wildlife, and an ecosystem pushed past the point of return, then we won’t have built something intelligent at all. We will have built the largest and most expensive monument to shortsighted avarice in human history.