A Utah data center proposed by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary is expected to be massive.
The project—called Stratos but also referred to as Wonder Valley—would be 40,000 acres, or roughly double the size of Manhattan. It could consume up to 9 GW of power, which is more than double the entire state’s average electricity use.
That is, if it ever gets built.
Right now, the reality of a 9 GW Utah data center doesn’t seem all that likely to Olivia Wang, a research analyst at Sightline Climate, an energy transition intelligence firm.
Or at least, she says, not “at anything close” to the scale currently being talked about.
“There is no precedent for a developer pulling off an off-grid project of this size yet,” Wang says via email, “and the project has none of the building blocks in place that would make us think otherwise.”
Sightline Climate has analyzed proposed data center projects previously. The company has more than 1,000 hyperscale data center projects around the world in its pipeline database, and scores them on certain factors to predict if they’ll actually get built.
Right now, Wang says, the model puts the likelihood of Wonder Valley actually materializing at “roughly 15%.”
‘Wonder Valley comes up short’
Sightline Climate looks at factors including how far along the data center project is in development, if power has been sourced and financing secured, whether any tenants have signed on, and so on.
“Wonder Valley comes up short on every single one at the moment,” Wang says.
Despite reporting by The Logic that said construction would start this year, with a first operating phase by 2027, there is no construction activity yet. The Stratos Project website currently says that Phase 1 construction will occur from 2026 to 2028.
The full buildout, including the 9 GW of capacity and about 90 data center buildings, is listed on the timeline under “2030+.”
Though O’Leary told the Desert News that “we’ve got tenants knocking on our door,” there’s not yet public information about any tenants signed on.
Wang adds that, to her knowledge, no power contracts have been signed and financing hasn’t been secured.
O’Leary’s company, O’Leary Digital, formed a joint venture with developer West GenCo on the project in February 2026, but that developer doesn’t seem to have a prior track record of delivering data center infrastructure. (Fast Company could not find a website or LinkedIn page for West GenCo, or even mentions of it separate from O’Leary.)
O’Leary Digital did not respond to a request for comments about these factors or timeline.
Project dates are getting harder to trust
Those are fundamental steps to getting a data center built that so far seem to be missing. But there are also “structural headwinds” that Wonder Valley faces that have stalled all sorts of data projects previously.
Though the data center boom, spurred by the expanding use of AI, doesn’t seem to be slowing down, not every project is likely to materialize.
A Sightline Climate report from February, authored by Wang, estimated that 30% to 50% of the 2026 pipeline is “unlikely to come online before the end of the year.”
“Projected delivery dates are getting harder to trust,” the report reads. “In 2025, 26% of expected capacity slipped, and another 10% of projects pushed back their commercial operation dates without much notice.”
Power is one of the biggest bottlenecks. For Wonder Valley specifically, the project plans to run entirely off-grid, but Wang notes that no air permit has been filed with the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
“Developers need to monitor air quality for a full year before they can even submit an application,” she noted, and the department commissioner has told the Standard-Examiner that it could take two years for the Stratos development to get those approvals.
“That makes O’Leary’s claim that the first gigawatt could be online within two years difficult to square with basic math,” she adds.
Data center opposition drives cancellations
The next big headwind is the growing data center opposition.
This opposition isn’t totally new. Between March and June of 2025, 20 data center projects, representing about $98 billion in investments, were blocked or delayed, according to Data Center Watch. There were multiple cases in which local opposition was reported to have played some role.
But it isn’t slowing down. A Gallup poll from May 13 found that seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing AI data centers in their areas; 48% of Americans are “strongly opposed.”
Wonder Valley specifically has been the source of much local contention. Residents have demonstrated against the project in person, and its water rights application was pulled after Utahns filed nearly 4,000 protests against the application.
“Several cite concerns about Utah’s drought and the declining Great Salt Lake,” The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Opposition “of this scale” has been driving project cancellations nationwide, Wang says. “We have tracked over 40 new moratorium proposals across the U.S. in just the past two months.”
Wang isn’t the only one who thinks Wonder Valley may not actually come to fruition.
Tech writer Ed Zitron has noted that “Nobody has built a 1GW data center,” so he doubts that O’Leary could build a 9GW one (or “do anything other than create another scandal and lose a bunch of people’s money,” he wrote).
Zitron has said it’s difficult to even get a sense of how much data center capacity hyperscalers are actually building. To him, this adds evidence to the idea that the AI data center boom is really just a bubble.