May 03, 2026

A single project in rural Utah is trying to bend the scale curve: O’Leary Digital’s “Project Stratos” is pitched as a 40,000‑acre mega data center paired with a nearly 9GW power plant in Box Elder County. The developers are promising unusually aggressive environmental safeguards—closed‑loop cooling and “low‑carbon” operations they claim are just 5% of the emissions of comparable plants—while the county is set to vote on approval at a special public meeting Monday at 4 p.m. The real story isn’t the marketing language; it’s what a yes (or no) would signal about how far local governments are willing to go to host campus‑scale AI infrastructure.

The Big Stories

Developers promise environmental safeguards for 40,000-acre data center — O’Leary Digital has proposed Project Stratos in Box Elder County, Utah: a 40,000‑acre development that combines a mega data center with a nearly 9GW power plant. The pitch leans heavily on “low‑carbon” claims (5% of the emissions of similar plants), closed‑loop cooling, and a community-benefits package that includes AI‑literacy programs. A county vote is scheduled for a special meeting Monday at 4 p.m. at the Box Elder County Fairgrounds; developers are talking about roughly 2,000 phase‑one jobs, with the potential to triple at full capacity.

Why it matters: this is the kind of proposal that forces permitting bodies to decide whether they’re evaluating a data center—or an integrated energy-and-compute megaproject with region-shaping footprint. If Box Elder County signs off, expect other developers to show up with similarly bundled “power + campus + benefits” packages, because it’s one of the few ways to make multi‑gigawatt aspirations sound locally legible.

Behind the Headlines

No additional distinct stories were included in today’s input, so there’s nothing else to pull forward here without repeating the same item.