Kevin O’Leary believes his 10,000-acre data center can be ‘beautiful’

If it ever gets built, the 7.5-gigawatt Stratos data center project in Utah would dwarf the artificial intelligence infrastructure that’s been built to date. Covering 10,000 acres of cattle-grazing land north of the Great Salt Lake, it would arguably be the largest data center in the world. That has many people in Utah concerned. The developer behind the project is Kevin O’Leary, the real estate investor familiar to many as a star of the ABC television show *Shark Tank* (and also the villain in the 2025 movie *Marty Supreme*). He says the increasingly competitive race for AI dominance among hyperscaler companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft is paving the way for giant data centers like Stratos to become the new normal. O’Leary and his company, O’Leary Digital, have brushed aside many of the resource concerns, saying the project would be creating its own energy generation capacity and not be using any water from the lake, relying instead on closed-loop cooling systems. He’s also found himself explaining to anyone who will listen that despite the project being widely reported as covering 40,000 acres, it’s actually a 10,000-acre data center set on a 40,000-acre site. But even at 10,000 acres, which is about two-thirds the area of Manhattan, the project is still immense. O’Leary is hoping to offset some of the sheer gigantism of the project with a design approach that softens the look of the data center buildings. The project, which has not yet been officially permitted for construction, was designed by the global architecture firm Gensler. The plan is for 55 data center buildings constructed in six phases over the course of a decade, with each building diverging from the typical warehouse look of most data centers. [Read more on Fast Company.](https://www.fastcompany.com/91550008/kevin-oleary-believes-his-10000-acre-data-center-can-be-beautiful)