Inside our months-long investigation into Kevin O’Leary’s Utah data center debacle

Today I’m talking with Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about Kevin O’Leary’s plans to build a massive data center in Utah.  The idea was to build the world’s biggest data center — a 40,000-acre AI campus with nine gigawatts of power, or more than double the average power usage of the entire state of Utah. The project is technically called Stratos, but it’s more prominently known as Wonder Valley, a reference to O’Leary’s nickname on Shark Tank. Josh has spent months reporting on this project, and it’s fair to say Wonder Valley has completely upended Utah politics. What Josh found throughout the course of his reporting was that the way this data center came together — how it was planned, how it was announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the dark — ultimately created a political firestorm so severe it stopped Stratos in its tracks.  Now, the details of what happened with Wonder Valley are obviously fascinating. But the story is also a larger look at the AI industry’s infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that buildout, and how the tech industry is running into the one obstacle it can’t seem to spend its way out of: local democracy.  Okay: The Verge’s Josh Dzieza on the Utah data center disaster. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  Josh Dzieza, you are a features writer here at The Verge. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to talk to you. For people who don’t know, Josh has one of the hardest jobs at The Verge. You just disappear for long periods of time, and then you come back with 15,000-word home runs, which is an enormous amount of pressure, but you keep hitting them. It’s a great job. [Verge features editor] Kevin Nguyen might say that editing those 15,000 words down to something manageable is the hardest job, but it’s all fun. The home run we sent you out to get this time was the story of what happened with Kevin O’Leary in Utah, where he p