Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority approved a development agreement Friday for a hyperscale data center campus in Box Elder County that could eventually draw 9 gigawatts of power, even as the county commission delayed its final vote until today.
The project would cover 40,000 acres of private land and 1,200 acres of military and state-owned property, with Phase 1 alone calling for about 3 gigawatts of generation capacity. Paul Morris said the facility “will not take one electron” from the existing grid, because the campus is planned to run off-grid through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, the 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its way from Wyoming to Oregon.
The scale of the project is the selling point. Morris projected it would bring Box Elder County $30 million a year in the opening phase and more than $100 million annually once the campus reaches full buildout. MIDA also projects $250 million a year in state sales tax receipts from the data centers alone, while the development is expected to create 2,000 permanent jobs after construction.
To win approval, MIDA cut the project’s energy use tax from 6% to 0.5% and agreed to rebate 80% of the property tax revenue generated by the development back to O’Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of Kevin O’Leary. The company is also developing a companion Wonder Valley campus in Alberta, Canada, which has not yet broken ground.
The missing piece is the tenant. No hyperscaler had been publicly named as of the time of writing, leaving the project’s biggest customer question unresolved even as the financing and tax terms move forward. O’Leary has cast the buildout as part of a broader race to secure power for artificial intelligence, saying China built 400 gigawatts of new power over the last 24 months and adding, “We’re in a race with them.”
That is the tension around the Utah data center: state-backed approvals and aggressive incentives are advancing before the operator has publicly disclosed who will use the campus, or how the scale of the power demand will look once the first phase is built.