The loudest data center fight in America, as seen from next door

Tim Munns didn’t tell his wife, Laurie, to expect company. It wasn’t until the gray truck pulled into their driveway at the end of a five-mile road — the headquarters of the Flying M Ranch — that he told her visitors were coming. She set her jaw and offered her hand.

Lately, it seemed, there’d been too much traffic coming down that dead-end road in Utah’s Hansel Valley. Door knockers — real estate developers, government reps, reporters from New York City and D.C. They all had questions or offers or requests that felt off-topic compared to the last 50 years of the Flying M and Hansel Valley’s shared history. They wanted to talk about a data center.

News of the proposed data center that would be among the world’s most powerful — the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center — coming to Utah first broke in April. But the plans for the project, co-developed by Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary and an independent state agency called the Utah Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), had already eclipsed the norms of daily life in the area. The workaday talk of calving and the dry spring weather was blotted out by the billionaire-sized data center and what it could mean for the valley.

People had questions. They showed up at county commissioners’ meetings asking about the project’s approval process, its role in national security and how it might impact the area.

A physics professor from Utah State University, in nearby Logan, calculated that at its originally proposed nine-gigawatt power capacity, the Stratos center would release a thermal load equivalent to the heat of 23 atomic bombs daily into the valley, on the north shore of the already ecologically imperiled Great Salt Lake. O’Leary, best known for his decadeslong appearance on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” went on Fox News to call the estimations “lies” and accuse Utahns opposing the project of being “proxies for the Chinese government,” a claim he later retracted. The story became a turning point in America’s bigger debate about what data centers are for, where they are built and how they could reshape the country.

Suddenly, there was a spotlight on sleepy Box Elder County and the Hansel Valley — a place not many outside of Utah had heard of before Kevin O’Leary came to town.

Word had reached the Flying M in March, about three months after representatives from O’Leary’s company and MIDA shepherded the Stratos plans into Gov. Spencer Cox’s office to gain his support for the project. A Utah-based real estate development company, West GenCo — established to oversee the purchase of the land needed for the center from ranchers and landowners — already had over 6,500 acres neighboring the Flying M Ranch under contract.

“Before they ever approached me, they had a toehold,” Tim Munns says, his upper lip blanketed by a thick white mustache. “It was a shock to us — as big a shock for us as anyone — when the plans for a data center came.”

For years, it had been in the back of his mind to try to keep something like this from happening. Since 2014, after a proposed landfill threatened environmental damage on the community, he’d been talking to neighbors about designating the Hansel Valley as an Agricultural Heritage Zone, a process he’d recently begun with the Box Elder County Commission.

“They drug their feet,” he says. “And, well, too late. Here comes the data center and MIDA.”

He told the representatives from MIDA and West GenCo that if they were going to meet, they could do it at his kitchen table.

They sat and listened as the representatives listed the Utah political heavyweights involved in the project. They explained that the U.S. is behind China in an AI battle, and that this data center is necessary for the military, a component of the Department of Defense’s infrastructure.

“That’s the story they told us,” Tim says. “And I believe part of it’s true.”

His and Laurie’s son, Bud, who returned to the family business after service in the Air Force as an A-10 Warthog fighter pilot, was deployed to the Middle East on temporary duty as a civilian this year. Tim decided to “take one for the team in the name of national defense.” But he also knew that the project had already secured water rights, enough land to move forward, and what seemed like enough political power to be unstoppable.

He told his family, “I don’t think we can beat this much, so it’s either we get on board and have a say in what’s going on, or we’d just have to watch it happen. We’d rather be at the table than be on the menu.”

The Munnses signed some papers in March and got back to work on the ranch. They planted in April, branded in May, moved the cattle to their summer grazing grounds in June, worked on water pipes in July and August. And people just kept showing up, asking questions about Hansel Valley, the future home of the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center. But the only Hansel Valley the Munnses know is the home of the Flying M Ranch.

49 years on the Flying M

Standing on Rattlesnake Pass, Tim points east, into a dry stretch of dusty-looking fields.

“That’s where I spent my childhood, hauling rocks off of that piece of land.”

He was 11 years old when his dad bought 1,510 acres in 1966. They had some dairy cows, and corn and red winter wheat to fill the grain bins. “My mother thought we’d bought the Louisiana Purchase or something — the way she was crowing and braying,” he recalls.

Eleven years later, in the spring of 1977, Tim caught wind of ground in Hansel Valley coming up for sale. He drove out, learned the old-timer who owned it wanted to get off the farm and get down to sunny St. George for retirement, and made an offer. Tim was just 22, and couldn’t afford all of it, but he could afford some of it.

His dad let him borrow the down payment, mortgaging a piece of the farm he grew up on. Tim struck the deal April 15, put the spring crops in and married Laurie two weeks later. They moved out to the valley with only a few truckloads full of furniture and clothes.

As the years passed, they filled their pastures with beef cattle and their home with four children. They installed water pipelines and solar-powered pumps for livestock, converted old cropland into rangeland and placed old rangeland into a Conservation Reserve Program. They stuck it out through droughts, wildfires, dust storms and the farm crash of 1985.

Back then, they could pile into their two-door Chevy Nova to go to church with their daughter Sarah, their son Sunny and their two twin boys, Bill and Bud, in the back seat and count 10 farms under foreclosure in the 40 miles between the Flying M and town. Through it all, neither Laurie nor Tim ever took a paying job off the ranch. Instead, they slowly paid off parcels and leveraged every dime so they could buy more.

The kids grew up, and the ranch got bigger. Sunny, who is 45 now, and Bud, 41, stuck around to work on the family business. Sunny runs 1,000 head of cattle on their 22,000 deeded acres, plus land permitted with government and tribal partners. The Munns family was an early adopter of forage kochia, which was first introduced to the United States in 1960 as an ornamental plant. It also happens to be fire-resistant and requires 70–80 percent less water than alfalfa, a popular feed crop in the region.

While planting it as cover for wildlife and birds, they noticed their cattle grazed on it in the winter. Now, the Flying M sells kochia seed for revegetation in fire rehabilitation and as a feed crop for cattle, an effort that Bud leads.

Over the past 49 years, conservation has become a core tenet at the Flying M. The Munnses kept cattle off grazing pastures to let the vegetation regenerate for 40 or more weeks a year, planted to quell dust storms and erosion, watered at night during off-peak hours to reduce pressure on the grid and water loss to evaporation. People took notice.

Professors from Utah State University would bring students out to use the ranch as a case study for new practices in sustainable agriculture and land management. In late 2024, Tim and Laurie won the Utah Leopold Conservation Award, which honors ranchers, farmers and forestland owners who set new standards in the management of soil health, water quality and wildlife habitat on their working land. Just a few months ago, they were also announced as regional winners of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Environmental Stewardship Award.

It’s a bit of a bright spot amid years of national headlines pointing toward Utah’s need for better resource management, as widespread drought and the overallocation of water have diminished the Great Salt Lake to a crisis and placed intense pressure on waning reservoirs that serve as the only dependable supply of water for millions.

“You can see the bathtub ring, you can see the lake shrinking,” Tim says on a hot morning in July, sweat already collecting under his hat brim. “I see it every day.”

The smoky breeze feels like it’s coming out of a hair dryer as he loads his dog, Donald, an Idaho shag, up into the four-seater Ranger. He and Laurie have got to go meet the mechanic who’d driven 100 miles to work on the pivot irrigating a field of kochia just west of the house. Tim noticed the pivot stopped moving the night before, so he turned the lines off. He didn’t want to waste any water.

Right now, about two-thirds of data centers under construction in the U.S. are being built in drought-stricken areas like Utah. The Stratos Hyperscale Data Center has 1.6 million gallons of water per day allotted through gross diversion under historic ranch water rights on the property purchased for the site. However, Paul Palandjian, CEO of O’Leary Digital, says that his team has submitted a revised application to the Division of Water Rights that nets consumption at under 900,000 gallons a day on average after recycling. He says that figure also includes the water used indirectly to generate the electricity needed to power the center.

Developers have long stated the project would leave more water available for the Great Salt Lake than agriculture does now. But independent researchers have found that, historically, because tech companies often aren’t required to report water consumption totals, it’s difficult to know just how much water data centers are really using.

The 80-acre patch of kochia at the Flying M gets watered once or twice a month, April through September. On those days, the pivot hovers above the prickly green stems and delivers a half-inch, or two inches if it’s hot, of water, brackish as it comes up from under the salt-crusted earth.

“We take a lot of pride in taking care of the land and everything else,” Laurie says, her blue eyes scanning the shrubby green kochia as Tim and the mechanic crowd around the irrigator’s control panel. “And if this data center goes in, how does it change our operation?”

She answers herself.

“I don’t think it changes our operation. We’ll continue to do what we do.”

The mechanic snaps the panel shut and walks back to the tower alongside Tim. Turns out, the end motor is out, Tim says, pointing up to the ribs of galvanized steel.

They tinker for a minute or two. Then, the water kicks back on, the pivot starts crawling through the crop, and the question of how the Flying M can square their stewardship with the potential impact of one of the world’s most powerful data centers hangs in the air.

‘At first I thought these numbers can’t even be right’

Rob Davies, a professor of physics at Utah State University, has spent most of his career researching why, in a world where most people value stability, justice, health and nature, the industrial and economic systems we have don’t.

After serving as an Air Force officer and becoming a physics professor, he found himself absorbed in uncovering how our systems could be so at odds with the practical nature of living on a planet that only has so much water, air and land.

But it wasn’t until he was sitting in his sunny office near the end of the spring semester that he had even heard about the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center, let alone considered how it fit into his research. An email pinged his inbox. The message, from his student Mallory Repscher, was straightforward.

“Have you heard of this data center in Box Elder County? Could you look at it and you tell us what you think and maybe give us some stats, just so we can understand it better?”

He looked up the plans and paused. His initial thought was that the number had to be wrong. Nine gigawatts. All generated with an on-site power plant using natural gas from the Ruby Pipeline. The original Stratos plans revealed an exceptional capacity for the data center to draw, distribute and process nine billion joules of electricity every single second to run facilities that will train, run and scale AI systems, as well as store data for whichever tech company O’Leary chooses to be the tenant of the development.

Even at the newly confirmed, reduced maximum capacity of 7.5 gigawatts, it would still dwarf all operating data centers in the U.S.

“It’s just so singular. It’s so massive,” Davies says. “At first I thought these numbers can’t even be right.”

If fully optimized, the Stratos center’s compute power could theoretically produce hundreds or even thousands of ExaFLOPS of total processing capability. For perspective, what a single ExaFLOP of processing can solve in one second is equivalent to having every single person on Earth, all eight billion people, do one math calculation every second, nonstop, for four years.

And, somehow, all that would have to be powered by electricity.

To figure out just how that could — or couldn’t — work, Davies started scratching some long division out on a piece of paper. Power plants that use natural gas — like the power plant that would be powering the Stratos center — convert about 50–60 percent of their fuel into electricity, on average, so he did the math, figuring in 50 percent efficiency. At the originally proposed full 9-gigawatt buildout, he calculated, that’s 18 gigawatts of generated power. He concluded that the thermal load could be the largest single-site heat source on the entire planet.

After backlash over the potential impacts of a 9-gigawatt operation, Cox said the initial operating phase would be capped at 1.5 gigawatts and occupy less than 2,000 acres, with each expansion requiring new approvals.

Amid concerns and multiple revisions to the project’s size and operating power, O’Leary and supporters of Stratos have emphasized how the Stratos center could boost the local economy in Box Elder County. O’Leary has promised 10,000 new construction jobs and 2,000 maintenance jobs just for the first 1.5 gigawatts that the center produces. “There’s a lot of economic upside,” he said during a debate with Tucker Carlson in May.

There’s also been an emphasis on boosting the nation’s compute power. That’s what’s needed to compete with China, O’Leary added during the debate — not just the number of data centers, but the amount of compute power the data centers have.

AI systems and data-heavy workloads require more compute capacity than smaller data centers traditionally can offer. The desire to build more data centers right now, according to O’Leary, isn’t to increase the number of data centers, but the total measure of compute capacity these data centers can produce to power AI.

MIDA has also described Stratos as infrastructure intended to support national defense. “At its core, this project is about infrastructure that supports military missions, not indirectly, but by design,” Hilary Venable, a MIDA project manager, told Box Elder County commissioners in April. A county FAQ went further, saying the project was “strongly connected to Hill Air Force Base and defense operations.”

Hill Air Force Base, however, says it is not participating in the project. “Hill AFB has no involvement,” said Tom Mullican, the base’s director of public affairs. MIDA says the campus is being designed to provide computing and data-storage capacity suitable for defense operations, but no military tenant or Defense Department contract has been publicly announced. The military connection is, for now, merely a potential use.

How data centers will be used is one question. Another is how they impact the communities around them. Towns running out of water in Texas, municipal water supplies contaminated with rare bacteria in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 50,000 residents losing electricity from a provider rerouting its power to a nearby data center, and strained electric suppliers and increased utility bills in Pennsylvania have raised concerns about the unforetold risks of data centers around the country. The worry that data centers hurt communities without offering much in return has created a unity in opposition among Americans that transcends left and right, urban and rural.

“I feel as though right now we no longer have the luxury of identifying as Blue or Red,” says Mallory Repscher, the student who sent the email that ultimately led Rob Davies to research the Stratos center. At a commissioner’s meeting about the project in April, she remembers “speaking with livestock farmers and alfalfa farmers, and they’re concerned about the health of their stock, the health of their crops. And then talking to someone else who’s talking about the environmental impact with the lake, and all of us are completely agreeing for the first time in my life. I’ve never seen that before.”

Shane Jenkins, a resident of Bear River City who was also at the meeting, remembers seeing cowboy hats, mullets and a mohawk in the packed room. “It’s bringing us together,” he says. “We’re all good people. And we’re gonna find common ground. … I just hope it’s not too late.”

From the golden spike to AI

The sweep of the Hansel Valley and Utah’s west desert makes everything feel far enough away that it could never be within reach. The lost-looking mountains and islands of sage give edges to a sprawl of gypsum and salt and dirt packed so hard the prints of those who walk on it rarely leave a mark. And if they do, the wind takes care of that promptly.

Looking across the land, it’s difficult to parse what’s always been here and what we’ve created. For thousands of years, signs of life have been swept up by time and the elements. After attempting to start a farm with the Goshute people in 1860, only for it to be abandoned, U.S. government agent Benjamin Davies reported that “scarcely a vestige of the improvements once existing was visible.”

That hasn’t stopped anyone from trying again, though. This basin has, for over a century, served as an obscure cradle of innovation. It’s the birthplace of the transcontinental railroad and of the country’s first solid-fueled Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and space rockets — technologies that changed how our world works, and what our lives look like.

When the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad met on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake after laying more than 1,900 miles of railroad track to get there, journeys across the West that would normally take a month were suddenly whittled away to a week or less.

The result of thousands of workers’ toil to grade, cut and build up the earth, the railroad changed the nation, and this region, forever — altering the natural water drainage patterns flowing from the Hansel Mountains toward the shore of the Great Salt Lake, and bringing in new industry.

Between 1870 and 1880, the Hansel Valley and surrounding communities saw a tremendous increase in livestock numbers, with totals surging from just over 5,000 in 1870 to roughly 28,000 in 1880. With the railroad right there to ship beef on, the market boomed. But the pressure of overgrazing destroyed native grasses, allowing invasive weeds to overrun the Hansel Valley range — a problem that the Munns family is still trying to repair.

The boom went quiet as new, more efficient rail routes were established, and the tracks were pulled up to be used as scrap metal in World War II.

A little more than a decade later, manufacturing company Thiokol was searching the West for a place to build and test solid rocket motors for space shuttles and intercontinental ballistic missiles. They needed isolation, a water supply and preexisting transportation infrastructure. Hansel Valley was the place.

Over the years, the company running operations out of the plant changed, but its importance in aerospace development remained. Northrop Grumman now manufactures the rocket that underpins the Artemis program, the SLS, here.

Today, the facility’s specialized water system currently pulls roughly 500,000 gallons of groundwater per day from on-site wells, increasing water use in the area. The on-site electrical grid also opened up surrounding utility right-of-ways and access to the neighboring Ruby Pipeline and the accompanying buried fiber for future projects. Like a data center.

Although the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center was approved by MIDA, which currently has the jurisdiction to override local municipal laws and claim eminent domain powers over the designated Stratos project area, Cox has called for reforms of the agency’s powers, explicitly stating that MIDA has strayed from its original military project focus. If the state Legislature passes laws restricting MIDA’s authority over nonmilitary projects, the project will no longer be able to move forward.

Since Cox’s announcement, MIDA has halted development due to ongoing lawsuits and citizen-led referendums against it. But if those lawsuits and referendums are settled or dismissed in court, the state can resume processing the project’s infrastructure and development applications.

“Out of respect for the subsequent referendum process and pending litigation, MIDA is reserving further comment on the project area,” says Kristin Kenney Williams, military operations and communications director at MIDA. But potential next steps include “the creation of a Box Elder County-expert Development Review Committee … and any action initiated by the development team, such as carrying out required state and federal environmental tests and submission of a development plan for the project.”

Palandjian says O’Leary Digital is still moving the project forward — submitting state applications for water rights and permits to review air emissions and environmental guidelines before any ground is broken.

The governor continues to describe domestic computing capacity as an economic and national-security imperative. But he has also conceded that the project’s rollout “was not good” and supported tighter oversight of both Stratos and MIDA.

Statewide bills that define what data centers are and introduce restrictions for resource consumption and transparency laws are anticipated to hit the floor for a vote when the Utah Legislature convenes in January. Similar bills are being introduced at the national level, but an executive order from President Donald Trump is currently streamlining the buildout of massive AI data centers by truncating environmental reviews and opening up public lands as build sites.

O’Leary has promised that the data center will comply with EPA regulations and air quality standards, but the Trump administration has recently eliminated any limits on climate and air pollution from power plants, so there aren’t any numbers to comply with.

As states take regulation into their own hands and the issue unfolds, the next chapter of how technological development will reshape the Hansel Valley — and the U.S. — will, too.

For decades, Davies, the USU physics professor, says the refrain in Utah “that’s been every governor’s mantra, Republican or Democrat, is that we’re open for business. We’re going to grease the skids.” But in the Hansel Valley, perhaps for the first time, the brakes are on.

The valley named for no one

When Kevin O’Leary first announced his plans for the Stratos project, he called his proposed campus “Wonder Valley” — a play on his self-styled nickname, “Mr. Wonderful.” But the Hansel Valley is named for no one.

Before that first little government farm appeared and disappeared in the valley, U.S. Army Capt. Samuel J. Hensley was headed west in 1848 when he ran into discharged members of the Mormon Battalion, who were returning home after a failed attempt to strike gold in California. The soldiers followed Hensley’s route and attempted to name the mountains, the valley and the spring along the way after him. But like a game of telephone, over time, Hensley became “Hensell,” then “Hansel.” The Hansel Valley, in a way, became no-man’s-land.

That may be its most accurate identifier. Like the Goshute and Shoshone people, who wintered here on their way to their summer grounds, most people have passed on through Hansel Valley, simply because there isn’t much to make a home out of. But then there’s the Flying M.

“We live here,” Tim Munns says. “We haven’t got a house in town. We haven’t went back and forth. Our kids were raised here. We breathed more air and drank more water and slept more nights here than anybody.”

Every day, he goes up to the high point of the Flying M, up in the Hansel Mountains. He slowly climbs the road he carved himself years ago, into a canyon so steep his stirrups could drag the ground. At times it felt like the walls were caving in every time there was any progress.

Now, it’s his favorite spot on the ranch. He comes up here to think.

“It’s the isolation” that draws him in, he says. “The peace and quiet serenity — and doing what we wanna do. This is what my boys want to do, this is what we want to do: ranching.”

He can see clear across Utah state lines into Nevada and Idaho. He can see the Great Salt Lake and its sun-bleached shoreline. He can see the old trestles of the transcontinental railroad and the lights of Northrop Grumman rocket park. He can also see exactly where the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center is intended to be built.

His eyes linger on that flat expanse of desert valley more now than they used to. He turns, picking his way back down from the ridgeline’s spur, his square-toed boots falling between tufts of crackly cheatgrass and dusty volcanic rocks baked with lichen.

When tough times hit the ranch and the reminders that there are easier ways to make a living felt constant, he learned to look up at the sky when everyone else looked at the dry earth. “When someone says the drought won’t break, I say, no, I got faith. It’s gonna rain. And if it don’t, we’ll survive it. We always have.”

This story appears in the November 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “That golden valley.” Learn more about how to subscribe.