O'Leary Digital's Stratos Project in Box Elder County, Utah, first approved by county commissioners in May, is designed to run on power generated on-site through a direct connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line. The project would start at roughly 3 gigawatts of generation capacity and could scale to 9 gigawatts, positioned explicitly as a way to avoid the years-long utility interconnection queues facing similar projects elsewhere. Utah officials have described the plan as running on 100% natural gas, while Kevin O'Leary has separately said a mix including wind and solar is also possible, a discrepancy that has not been publicly reconciled.
Stratos Isn't the Only Campus Skipping the Grid
The pitch is becoming standard among the largest AI infrastructure projects announced this year. SoftBank's planned 10-gigawatt campus at a former uranium enrichment site in Piketon, Ohio, includes up to 10 gigawatts of new power generation, including 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas, though the project also involves a $4.2 billion grid transmission investment and remains grid-connected rather than fully independent. Meta's Hyperion data center in Louisiana is similarly paired with dedicated gas-fired power plants built specifically to serve the site, which likewise remain connected to Entergy's broader grid. The pattern suggests that dedicated, on-site generation is becoming the default pitch for hyperscale AI campuses, even when the resulting facilities are not actually operating fully independent of the grid in practice. The White House called on technology companies in March to commit to developing power generation alongside their data center sites, a policy signal that predates and extends beyond any single developer's project.
The Water Claims Are Following the Same Pattern as the Power Claims
O'Leary has also argued publicly that Stratos will use far less water than critics assume, pointing to a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water rather than relying on evaporative cooling. Closed-loop systems can substantially reduce water withdrawals compared with conventional evaporative cooling, but actual water use depends on the specific cooling architecture, the power generation mix, site climate, and final engineering design, and public permitting documents for the project have not yet disclosed those technical details. That gap between public messaging and disclosed engineering specifics mirrors the same pattern seen in the project's power claims: developer commitments made at the approval stage are often more specific in aspiration than in the underlying technical filings, which is precisely where site-selection and permitting risk tends to surface later in a project's timeline.
Two years ago, data center developers pitching mega-campuses to local governments led with jobs and tax revenue. The pitch has shifted toward infrastructure independence: dedicated generation, on-site water recycling, and reduced grid dependence. Whether that independence holds up in the engineering documents filed after approval, not the claims made before it, is what will determine which of these projects actually deliver on the pitch.
Opposition to the Project Has Escalated Into a Defamation Lawsuit
The dispute over Stratos has moved beyond permitting into litigation. Two Utah advocacy groups, the Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies, sued O'Leary and Fox News for defamation in federal court in mid-July, after O'Leary suggested on air that opposition to the project was linked to Chinese Communist Party-connected funding, a claim he later said he could not substantiate. The suit follows months of political fallout: Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, who had pushed O'Leary to cut the project's footprint by 75%, lost his reelection bid last month, and a separate effort to let voters overturn the county's approval was rejected by the county attorney and is now on appeal.
