On the morning of May 11th, the celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary appeared on Fox Business and announced that he was under attack by Chinese agents.
For weeks, he had been going on TV and posting online to tout his project, called Wonder Valley, after his nickname from the reality show Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful. It was going to be enormous, “the largest data center in the world,” sitting on 40,000 acres north of Great Salt Lake in rural Box Elder County, Utah. A dedicated gas power plant would tap into an interstate pipeline and generate 9 gigawatts of electricity, more than double the average consumption of the entire state. The project was coming so fast, thanks to Utah’s governor and legislative leaders, O’Leary said, that “it shows China and the rest of the world we aren’t messing around.”
But now, wearing a black baseball cap printed with the words “Utah National Security,” he told Maria Bartiromo that he had noticed something baffling. Ever since the three county commissioners unanimously approved his data center the week before, O’Leary had observed a sudden increase in people mad at him online. For this he could see only one explanation.
“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that?” he asked Bartiromo. “There’s only one: It’s China.”
“I got my guys to go a deep dig into the IP addresses,” he told Bartiromo. Brandishing a sheet of paper, he began to read the names of people who had — or he believed to be somehow connected to people who had — criticized his data center online.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are and let’s shine the light of transparency on what you’re doing,” he exclaimed, looking up from his paper to address the camera and inviting them to clear their names. “It’s the CPP [sic] at work here. There’s no question about it.”
Six weeks later, Bartiromo closed out a segment by pulling up a note O’Leary had posted the day before, white text on a black background: “Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Kanter are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party.”
“How the heck would anybody think you could build something out here?”
Nor was Fox News Media aware of any evidence that they are funded or directed by China or the Chinese Communist Party, Bartiromo said. “Fox News Media apologizes for the error.”
O’Leary’s “clarification” was an abrupt shift in tone. From the moment he announced the project he had proclaimed it as all but inevitable: blessed by state leadership, approved unanimously by local officials, demanded by national security, and opposed only by sinister outside forces. Now came a quiet retreat. Less than three weeks later, O’Leary and Fox were sued for defamation by Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, and Joshua Kanter. O’Leary and Fox moved to have the suit dismissed in late September.
This year, Goldman Sachs estimates that $580 billion will be invested in AI infrastructure in the United States, much of it tied to the enormous data centers being built by Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and others. Superlatives have fallen by the wayside. This is more than federal, state, and local governments are on pace to spend this year building public infrastructure, nearly twice what the US spent going to the Moon, adjusted for inflation, and almost as much as it cost to build the entire interstate highway system over 40 years. At nearly 2 percent of GDP, the AI buildout rivals the railroad boom of the late 19th century, a construction frenzy that transformed the nation, triggered multiple financial crashes, laid tracks to nowhere, created a new politics of anti-monopoly populism, and established a new oligarchy.
Data centers have existed for decades, but those of the AI boom are orders of magnitude larger than the boxy structures built to store our emails and videos. In 2019, a notably large data center might have been the size of an Ikea and consumed as much electricity as 50,000 US homes; it would probably have been located near others of its kind, clustered near electricity and fiber connections in a place like “Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County, Virginia. A modern AI data center like Meta’s Hyperion, for comparison, stands alone on 5 square miles of rural Richland Parish, Louisiana. It will be powered by 10 new gas power plants with 7.5 gigawatts of generating capacity, more than the power demand of all the 250-plus data centers in Data Center Alley combined. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg illustrated its size by posting an animation of a Facebook-blue building crushing Manhattan.
While size is important, speed is paramount. “Everything is about speed right now,” said Reyk Knuhtsen, an analyst at the consulting firm SemiAnalysis. “Everything.”
The man who called Munns inquiring about land was Austin Pritchett, an entrepreneur based in Alpine, Utah. Pritchett earned an MBA from Cornell in 2016, according to his LinkedIn, and practices a form of real estate development that finds profit in getting raw land zoned and permitted for construction. Municipal records illustrate one version of the model: Partner with owners of farmland near an expanding city, line up a homebuilder willing to buy if the land can be developed, and seek the local approvals needed for construction. The process can take years and might never pay off, but it is a way to profit off real estate without needing to purchase land outright. Pritchett also sells online classes teaching his approach for $25,000 a course.
“Builders need entitled land,” a page for one of Pritchett’s workshops reads. “They don’t want to spend 12–18 months navigating zoning boards. Hand them a permitted site and they’ll pay a premium typically 2–3x what the raw land cost.” His previous publicly documented projects were mostly suburban housing, but last October, he added a new lesson: “New Portal and Data Center Land (Current Gold Rush).”
By November 2025, Pritchett was approaching landowners in Hansel Valley. He was very polite, according to a landowner he met with at the time, LuAnn Adams. “They said, ‘Shh, don’t tell anybody, don’t tell anybody,’” she later said at a county meeting. “So I kept it to myself for a little while.”
Pritchett later said he was drawn to Hansel Valley because much of the land was owned by only a few people, making it straightforward to acquire. But the most enticing thing it had to offer was the 42-inch-diameter gas pipeline running through it, offering a fast route to abundant power.
A data center would be a far bigger project than anything Pritchett had handled before. He contacted a fellow Alpine resident, former Congressman Jason Chaffetz. Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor, texted O’Leary, who he knew from appearing on television together. O’Leary had passed on Chaffetz’s past pitches, Chaffetz said, but this one piqued his interest.
“I like interacting with Kevin because he responds right away,” Chaffetz says. He introduced O’Leary to Pritchett and will be compensated if the project “comes together,” he said, though the details of the arrangement are bound by an NDA.
On December 16th, a lobbyist emailed the governor’s scheduler to say that O’Leary would be in town in a few weeks. “KO from Shark Tank would like to meet with the Gov on Jan 8 to discuss data centers in UT,” the lobbyist wrote.
“Austin told us, day one, it was the biggest single project in the history of mankind.”
Gov. Spencer Cox and the Utah legislature had been working to make the state attractive to data centers, which are an appealing source of tax revenue for state governments. Utah already exempted data centers from paying sales tax on certain equipment, and in 2024 Cox launched “Operation Gigawatt,” an effort to double the state’s electricity generation, in part to support all the data center developers who had expressed interest in coming to Utah. Last year, the legislature passed a law that allows data centers to build on-site power plants.
O’Leary arrived at the Statehouse on the morning of January 8th and had his photo taken sitting behind the governor’s desk. The next day, he appeared on NewsNation and discussed meeting Cox and Senate President J. Stuart Adams. Adams, seen by many as the most powerful political figure in the state, was also the chairman of the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), a state development authority created to facilitate projects connected to military installations. “They rolled out the red carpet for my entire team,” O’Leary said. “They’re really going to accelerate policy in terms of getting permits.”
When Pritchett came out to the Munns’ property two months later, he described a project that already sounded far along, according to Tim Munns and his son, Bud. The state was involved. Pritchett said he already had the necessary land and water rights under contract. He just wanted a bit of the Munns’ property on the margin, and if he didn’t get it, the Munnses understood, he had other options.
“He wasn’t pushy,” Bud says. “He just flat laid out the facts and said, ‘Now you guys decide what you want to do.’"
As for what was coming, Bud couldn’t wrap his head around it. He didn’t know what MIDA was, though he serves in the Air National Guard and the idea that the data center might have a military use appealed to him. He’d watched Shark Tank a few times but had to Google which one Kevin O’Leary was. As for what the valley would look like after the “biggest data center in the world” landed in it, he had no idea. “Anything of the magnitude of what he described going down there was a little bit of a shock,” Bud says.
Tim told the commissioners, and with the project sounding increasingly real, they redoubled their efforts to figure out what was going on. One of them called their state senator, Scott Sandall, who said he would ask around. Soon afterward, Commissioner Perry received a text from Paul Morris, then the executive director of MIDA, saying that he’d gotten his number from the senator and that he would be at the county courthouse the next morning to “provide an update.”
“I’ve never seen anything go this fast in all the time I’ve been in politics. You can’t even build a house that fast.”
Perry didn’t believe MIDA’s deadline. Born and raised in Box Elder, Perry had joined the highway patrol and served on the governor’s security detail in the early 1990s. Organizing for a pay raise opened his eyes to what politics could accomplish, and after his local representative failed to show up for an event he organized or respond to repeated emails, he ran against him and won. He served five terms and retired to work in the private sector but got recruited to run for county commissioner instead. Even with all that experience, the speed of the data center project was new.
“I’ve never seen anything go this fast in all the time I’ve been in politics,” Perry said. “You can’t even build a house that fast.”
But MIDA moved quickly, emailing the commissioners an agreement to be approved on April 15th, then PR material for after their vote. The commissioners had some complaints about the language. “From what we’ve seen, Kevin O’Leary, the investor, has also been using similar messaging about the county ‘inviting’ the project to come. Which is just the wrong word,” a county attorney wrote.
Because the land was unzoned and the developers were building their own power and water systems, the commissioners’ options were limited. They could refuse to consent to MIDA’s project area, but they worried that the developers might sue. In his research, Perry came across the case of Saline Township in Michigan, where the town board rejected a rezoning request for an OpenAI data center. The developer sued, alleging exclusionary zoning. The town settled, and the data center is being built anyway.
Timeline
October–November 2025
Utah real estate entrepreneur Austin Pritchett begins approaching Box Elder County landowners about a data center project. Former Congressman Jason Chaffetz introduces him to celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary.
January 8th, 2026
O’Leary’s team meets with Gov. Spencer Cox and later meets with state Senate President Stuart Adams, who chaired MIDA.
February 17th
The developers announce “Wonder Valley Utah,” a proposed 7.5-gigawatt data center campus, in a press release that attracts little public attention.
March
Landowners alert county commissioners to the project. MIDA formally briefs the commissioners on March 25th and tells them approval is needed by the end of April or the deal could collapse.
April 7th–22nd
MIDA sends the county an agreement to approve, along with a press release written for the commissioners. The first public-meeting agenda refers only to an “interlocal agreement,” without mentioning a data center; commissioners meet but postpone the vote.
April 24th
MIDA’s board approves the 40,000-acre project area before the county commissioners consent. O’Leary describes the project as part of a “race” with China. Word about the project begins to spread in Box Elder County.
April 27th
At a packed county meeting, MIDA cannot say how much of the project would serve the military, and major engineering studies remain unfinished. Commissioners postpone the vote until May 4th.
May 4th
More than 1,000 people attend the final meeting. Commissioners allow no public comment, leave the stage amid protests, and approve the project from a back room.
May
Residents organize a referendum campaign. The county rejects their applications, prompting a lawsuit. The developer also withdraws a contested water rights application while planning to refile it later.
June
Adams and two county commissioners who support the project lose their Republican primaries. O’Leary and two Fox hosts retract claims that protesters and project opponents were working for China; O’Leary and Fox are later sued for defamation.
By late August
The project has been downsized and remains stalled. No tenant has been announced, no land has been transferred to the developers, and several central agreements remain unsigned.
If a data center was coming, the commissioners felt that the developers should pay for the cost of the additional services it would require, an amount the county estimated to be $16.2 million. The county, Morris, and the developers haggled over the terms as the April 15th target passed and moved to April 22nd, the commission’s next scheduled meeting.
A public notice was issued for the vote. It appeared on the county’s upcoming agenda as item 9A, “Interlocal Agreement #26-15 Between Box Elder County and the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) Relating to the Stratos Project Area,” using a project name Morris said MIDA liked because it was Greek for “army.” There wa
