Original Summary

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 centers — 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 build out, 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 promised to build what was going to be the biggest data center in the world. He was all over the news talking about building the biggest data center in the world, it was called Stratos. He was calling the entire development Wonder Valley. This thing fell apart in a bunch of anger from the local community. There’s a defamation lawsuit because O’Leary referred to all of his critics as Chinese spies on Fox News. Fox News had to apologize on the air . Josh, when you started reporting on this story, it struck me that there would be some similarities to the huge feature you wrote about the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, my hometown, where President Trump announced that Foxconn was going to build a massive LCD factory in the middle of Wisconsin. There were supposed to be 13,000 jobs, and none of that happened. Actually, what’s funny about that is now that land is being used for a Microsoft data center , which is just maybe the natural end state of all things. Walk me through the parallels and differences at a high level. What did this feel like to report? I did not expect this to feel so similar to Foxconn initially, because unlike the Foxconn project, the data center buildout is real and at least theoretically can make sense in many cases. These things are actually getting built — unlike an LCD fab in the middle of Wisconsin. It turned out that there are more parallels than I thought. I mean, one, just the actors that you have that takes place mostly with local officials and planning meetings and angry residents and things like that. But also there’s a lot more data centers on paper and speculation, things that are maybe real and maybe not that are more difficult to suss out than I was fully aware of going into data center reporting. Let’s start at the very start of this project. There’s an enormous cast of characters involved. There’s a whole bunch of government agencies, but this starts with people in Utah looking at 40,000 acres of empty space and realizing that something is about to happen. We can start with the beginning of the project, which is several months before anyone had any idea anything was happening, including most people in Utah — except for a handful of people who own property in this remote valley, some people in the state government at this one agency that became involved and a few real estate developers. So everyone except maybe a dozen or so people found out about this project when Kevin O’Leary starts talking about it as an enormous data center that he’s building in Utah called Wonder Valley, or sometimes Stratos, depending on what program word they’re using at the moment. O’Leary comes out in late April and says, “We’re building this giant thing,” and that’s the first time most people in the county, and in the state, had heard about it. How did Kevin O’Leary get the approvals to even begin saying he was going to start building this data center so publicly if no one knew about it? It is partly because it ran through an agency called MIDA (Military Installation Development Authority), which is like a state development agency that deals with projects that have some military purpose. I think the military purpose can be fairly tangential. MIDA has a luxury ski resort that gives veterans discounts, but it began as a way to create projects on military property that was unused or could be put to more economic use. And then the taxes go back to the state, some of which can fund military developments. It also has a lot of power to override local land use. It basically becomes the municipal government in whatever project area it establishes. So if it establishes a project area, in theory, it would really speed up all the permitting and zoning and other regulations that can be a huge problem for data center projects. In order to establish a project area, the board has to ratify it and all the landowners in the area have to give their consent and then the local government — in this case, the county — has

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：英语新闻 / The Verge
  • 发布时间：2026/10/1 22:00:00