This story is part of our ongoing investigative series, Hidden Wonder Valley.

Two Utah lawmakers are walking back their once unbridled support for celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary's Stratos Project, a proposed 9-gigawatt artificial intelligence (AI) data centre near the Great Salt Lake, as opposition grows and a midterm election approaches.

Utah Senate President Stuart Adams is demanding O'Leary reduce the footprint of the project by 75%, shrinking it from 40,000 to just 10,000 acres (16,200 to 4,050 hectares) and include more environmental protection and transparency measures.

"Utah can pursue economic opportunity while protecting our water, air, wildlife, and communities," Adams said in a statement. "We can and must do both."

Adams added that he wrote a letter to O'Leary asking him to find ways to reduce water consumption, add water to the Great Salt Lake after treatment, and take steps to work with state officials on land conservation. To reduce concerns about heat from the computer servers being unleashed on the surrounding landscape, he called for the project to include heat-capture technologies.

Experts told the Salt Lake Tribune the heat from the project would have "devastating consequences" for wildlife, plants, and the fertility of other ranchland in the Hansel Valley.

One of Adams' challengers in this month's Republican primary election, attorney Stephanie Hollist, said the senator's actions are "too little, too late" and that he should have engaged with the public earlier. She wants the data centre approval process paused until the impacts are fully understood.

U.S. jurisdictions that once provided aggressive economic incentives to attract data centres are now pivoting, found researchers at the University of Virginia who reviewed more than 700 federal, state, and local data centre policies across the country. They are repealing or tightening tax exemptions and mandating temporary pauses until regulations can be drafted.

At least 20 moratoria have been proposed at the local, state, and federal levels, and local governments are increasingly using zoning ordinances to restrict data centres.

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Activists in Utah are skeptical of Adams' about-face. He is a voting member of the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), which is partnering with O'Leary to develop the project and advocated on behalf of the developer in compensation negotiations with Box Elder County.

"The only reason Adams is sending the letter is to help his upcoming re-election campaign," Brenna Williams, lead liaison for the Box Elder County Accountability Referendum (BEAR) campaign, told ABC4 Utah News. "Indivisible Utah is running a postcard campaign against him so I'm sure he's feeling pressure."

Williams is currently appealing a ruling in Utah's First District Court against her group's two applications for a referendum on the Stratos project.

"We care deeply about this community and will fight to protect it from those who seek to do it harm," Williams said in a news release following the May 28 court decision.

Adams was among several politicians O'Leary praised in a release announcing the data centre in February. He also named Governor Spencer J. Cox and Utah senators Mike Lee and John R. Curtis, saying that "projects of this magnitude require disciplined execution and close collaboration with state and local leadership."

Opponents rallied at the state capital and delivered a letter to Cox with more than 6,000 signatures urging him to take "binding action" to preserve the Great Salt Lake, reports Grist.

O'Leary has claimed outside interests are funding the protesters and spreading false information about the development.

Cox said the rollout of the Stratos Project was handled poorly, telling reporters "there's no question, the process was not good."

He issued an executive order to "raise the bar" for data centre development in the state, announcing a new framework to address issues such as air quality, water, wildlife, utility costs, and transparency to "ensure that data center development aligns with Utah's long-term interests and reflects Utah values."

Cox also recently told the Salt Lake Tribune that although the first phase of the project would be gas-powered, future phases should include "nuclear, geothermal, solar, and other technology."

Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and analyst with Utah Clean Energy, calculated that a 9-GW gas power plant would produce about 35 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year and could raise Utah's emissions by about 64%.

Water has been the other big concern. Without explanation, O'Leary withdrew a second application for a water permit for the project last week. The first application received thousands of formal protests before it was withdrawn, and the second one saw nearly 700 objections, reported ABC News4Utah.

In his statement, Adams also demanded that O'Leary improve transparency by developing a public-facing website hosting information about all Stratos Project approvals and permits. O'Leary's original website includes information about both the Stratos project-originally named Wonder Valley-and a nearly identical data centre project planned for northern Alberta, also called Wonder Valley.

A new website dedicated to Stratos has been launched, stating that the project's "future phases are expected to include additional sources beyond gas-fired generation." The type of energy will "depend on regulatory approvals, technology availability, and infrastructure development at the time of each phase."

With controversy still swirling in Utah, O'Leary is holding an open house June 4 in a small hamlet near his proposed AI data centre and power plant in Alberta.

A citizen petition to the House of Commons initiated in Red Deer, Alberta, calls for a "federal moratorium on the approval, construction, expansion, or operation of proposed hyperscale AI data centres in Alberta." It names Wonder Valley and another hyperscale data centre proposed in Olds, Alta. by the Synapse Real Estate Group. The petition is sponsored by NDP Member of Parliament Heather McPherson.

Concerns about the Wonder Valley project were a focus of a virtual town hall hosted last week by Public Interest Alberta, a public sector advocacy group. Among the speakers was Melanie Sachs, a Maine state representative, who described her efforts to legislate a moratorium on data centres in Maine. The law passed the House and the Senate with bipartisan support, only to be vetoed by Governor Janet Mills.

Sachs told attendees that data centre planning is often done behind closed doors and that communities need to be proactive in asking questions of the government before it's too late.

The Municipal District of Greenview, which will host the Wonder Valley project and has been working closely with O'Leary since 2024, has spent about C$70 million so far preparing the site for industrial development. When The Energy Mix asked whether the municipality was concerned about the Utah controversy spilling over into Canada, Manager of Communications and Marketing Stacey Sevilla said the district "did not have any additional information to provide."

She did not answer questions about concerns the data centre may be used by the U.S. military, as is the case with the Utah project, or questions about data sovereignty.

Greenview issued its first newsletter about the project, indicating O'Leary is planning to begin construction sometime in 2027.

The Mix also reached out to O'Leary's contact email for the upcoming open house in Grovedale with questions about water, battery energy storage, plans for carbon capture, and gas supply arrangements, but did not receive a response.

Alberta's Premier Danielle Smith is promoting an AI data centre strategy aimed at attracting $100 billion in investment by offering tax breaks to companies that supply their own power. The province is aiming to double its gas production by powering new data centres, but a prominent energy analyst told The Mix the strategy's focus on gas, while restrictions on renewables remain in effect, could "kill the data centre industry they're hoping to create."

In Alberta too, questions are surfacing about the transparency of decision-making around major data centre developments. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner is investigating whether the Premier's office met the "duty to assist" standard after The Mix's Access to Information request returned no documents related to Kevin O'Leary, his company and co-founder Carl Agren, Kyle Reiling or Tyler Olsen from the MD of Greenview, and/or The Phoenix Group UAE (United Arab Emirates).

O'Leary's $70-billion Wonder Valley data centre is so far nearly identical to Utah's, with demand for 7.5 GW of power at full buildout. It's also located in a drought-stricken area that has declared an agricultural disaster the last two summers. The project would use anywhere from 6 to 24 million cubic metres of water, covering a smaller area of nearly 65 square kilometres, and produce as much as 30 megatonnes of emissions annually, depending on what technology and mitigation measures are used.

Source: The Energy Mix