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Utah residents fight Kevin O'Leary's fast-tracked 9 GW Wonder Valley data center
Kevin O'Leary's 9-gigawatt Wonder Valley data center won a unanimous county vote in Utah, then ran into residents its backers had not told. For an AI tenant comparing sites, the date the neighbors found out belongs in the approval file next to the vote.
The Product Desk · Product desk
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What happened
- A dedicated gas plant tapping an interstate pipeline would power the site, producing more than double Utah's average statewide electricity consumption.
- On May 11, O'Leary told Fox Business that China was behind the online criticism and read out names of people he linked to his critics.
- About six weeks later he posted that he had no evidence those groups and people were funded by China, and Fox apologized on air for the error.
- Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson and Joshua Kanter sued O'Leary and Fox for defamation; the defendants moved to dismiss in late September.
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Why it matters
- decision A tenant weighing Wonder Valley has to judge the three-commissioner vote and the resident backlash as separate risks, because the vote came before the neighbors weighed in.
- exposure Publicly tying local critics to China has left O'Leary and Fox defending a defamation case, a legal cost created by the project's own publicity.
- constraint A process kept away from residents pushes their objections past the vote, where they can only surface as public backlash or litigation.
Paul Palandjian, the CEO and cofounder of O'Leary Digital, described himself to The Verge as "an open kimono" of transparency [11]. The reporter then emailed him questions and asked to speak with O'Leary. The reply came from a lawyer, threatening legal action over any false statements [11].
The pitch was speed, backed by state officials. O'Leary said the project was moving fast thanks to Utah's governor and legislative leaders, and that "it shows China and the rest of the world we aren't messing around" [10]. The Verge drew on more than two dozen interviews and thousands of pages of emails and texts obtained through public records requests [9]. That record shows a project that moved "with the urgency of an emergency," with O'Leary racing rival projects "chasing the same few tenants" [9].
The project is built for those tenants. One of them would be signing up for 40,000 acres north of Great Salt Lake, about 62.5 square miles [1][2]. The power plan puts Utah's whole average draw at under 4.5 GW, half the site's planned output [1].
On a tenant's diligence list, a unanimous vote by three county commissioners looks like a settled site [3]. The promoters' account of the opposition was that it came from somewhere else. O'Leary had presented the project as all but inevitable and "opposed only by sinister outside forces," The Verge wrote [13]. He told Fox Business, "I got my guys to go a deep dig into the IP addresses" [5]. What Utahns actually did was fight back. According to The Verge, O'Leary's attention-seeking "popularized and energized the backlash" among people who want nothing to do with data centers [12].
The record establishes a backlash and a lawsuit, but not a reversed approval or a delayed build. One case of opposition arriving after a vote cannot show how often local fights stop projects of this size.
I'd count a vote taken before the neighbors knew as an incomplete approval, and I'd price the unfinished local fight into any site comparison. The tradeoff is speed. A developer who tells residents first loses time in a race for a small pool of tenants [9]. A tenant who insists on that order may lose the site to a faster rival.
Two dates sort a candidate site: when the nearest residents first heard about the project, and when the governing body voted. Put the speed of the vote on one axis and the order of those dates on the other. The best position, and the rarest, is a fast vote held after residents were told. A slow vote after notice costs calendar time but leaves fewer surprises once the lease is signed. The worst corner is a slow vote that still came before residents knew, which costs the time and leaves the backlash still to come. Wonder Valley, which The Verge reports was fast-tracked in secret to avoid the scrutiny of the people who live there, sits in the corner with a fast vote and residents who learned afterward [8].
What to watch
- The ruling on O'Leary's and Fox's late-September motion to dismiss the defamation suit.
- Whether the Box Elder County commissioners revisit or attach conditions to their unanimous approval.
- Whether Wonder Valley signs a named tenant, given rival projects chasing the same small pool of buyers.