Utah's Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) on Friday approved a development agreement for a hyperscale data center campus in Box Elder County that could eventually consume 9 GW of power, more than double the state's current average electricity use of roughly 4 GW, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
The project, dubbed Stratos, is being developed by O'Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary, and would span 40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military and state-owned property.
Phase 1 alone calls for approximately 3 GW of generation capacity. At full buildout, the campus would reach 9 GW, all produced on-site through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its route from Wyoming to Oregon. MIDA executive director Paul Morris told county commissioners that the facility “will not take one electron” from the existing grid and could eventually feed surplus power back into it.
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