The project area for the hyperscale data center campus planned for Box Elder County is getting about 20,000 acres smaller — and the buildings themselves will cover even less ground.
Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary on Thursday responded to “significant” demands from Senate President J. Stuart Adams by agreeing to remove 19,430 acres around Locomotive Springs and another 620 acres near Interstate 80 from the Stratos Project data center site.
The data center campus will be on a smaller footprint, likely 10,000 acres or less, with the remaining area left as open land between buildings and for possible solar power or battery arrays, O’Leary told The Tribune.
“It certainly, under this new profile, will not be the largest data center in the world,” O’Leary said. “That’s off the table.”
He said he took some time to respond to Adams’ demands because he had to talk with engineers, designers and the project’s five tenants.
O’Leary wrote in the letter to Adams that a “broader expansion area” will be available for advanced manufacturing and defense-industrial uses, noting that it would be similar to what exists on the campuses of Utah-based Northrop Grumman and Nucor.
Read the full article by Megan Banta at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.