This post was originally published on Neowin
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Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) has approved a 9-gigawatt hyperscale data center campus in Box Elder County. The data center will be built by Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman and Shark Tank investor, through his company O’Leary Digital, which apparently isn’t a digital marketing agency, but instead an infrastructure venture for building enormous data centers.
The project, named Stratos, will span over 40,000 acres and run entirely off-grid. It will be powered by natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that passes through Northern Utah, rather than the public electricity grid. This is also somewhat of a trend, as companies are constantly looking for new ways to run their data centers more efficiently.
At full buildout, Stratos would generate and consume more than twice the power that the entire state of Utah currently uses. Phase 1 targets 3 gigawatts, with expansion planned to 9 gigawatts across multiple phases. To put that in perspective, 9 gigawatts of continuous output would be enough to power roughly 6.75 million American homes around the clock.
As is usually the case with these gigantic facilities, Stratos
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