GridSight Local Sentiment Index
Box Elder County, UT: the Stratos data center
Stratos: O'Leary Ventures / O'Leary Digital, via MIDA project area
Applicant / entity
O'Leary Ventures / O'Leary Digital, via MIDA project area
Capacity
up to 9 GW claimed
Developer type
celebrity-backed
Jurisdiction
rural county under state authority
Status
Delayed
Sentiment
44/100
Mixed DelayedHalf of resamples fall between 43 and 45. Differences smaller than that are not meaningful.
- Loudness
- 98Very loud · 69 normalized: 39 per 10,000 residents, the basis on which this market compares to another
- Scope
- Concern sits at state; the venue acting on it is state.hyper-local›county›regional›state›national
- Veto point
- None Land-use authority was transferred to the Military Installation Development Authority for 50 years by interlocal agreement, so the county had nothing left to withhold. The 180-day county moratorium adopted 6/10/2026 explicitly does not reach this project. The referendum was denied on the ground that the commission's act was administrative rather than legislative.
Where this market sits
Every market GridSight has scored, on sentiment against absolute loudness. A market can be quiet and negative, or loud and mixed. Those are different situations and they call for different responses. Loudness is scaled against fixed references rather than against the loudest market scored, so adding a market does not move anyone else's position.
| Market | Sentiment | Loud | Norm | Scope | Veto | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saline Township, MI | 29 | 89 | 94 | county › state | binding | Not approved ⚖ |
| Nashville, TN | 31 | 78 | 41 | hyper-local › county | binding | Not approved ⚖ |
| Hanover County, VA | 35 | 65 | 83 | county › county | binding | Not approved |
| Effingham County, GA | 37 | 68 | 77 | county › state | none | Approved, contested |
| New Albany / Licking County, OH | 40 | 63 | 63 | state › county | binding | Approved, contested |
| Charlotte, NC | 41 | 72 | 75 | hyper-local › county | binding | Delayed |
| Coweta County, GA | 41 | 84 | 127 | county › county | binding | Approved, contested ⚖ |
| Box Elder County, UT | 44 | 98 | 69 | state › state | none | Delayed |
| Memphis metro, TN / MS | 44 | 86 | 61 | hyper-local › national | conditional | Approved, contested ⚖ |
| Richland Parish, LA | 51 | 76 | 12 | state › state | none | Approved, contested |
Concern categories
Concern runs 0-100 and higher is worse. Every row opens to its evidence and its public-record / digital split. The score is the inverse of the weighted mean across evidenced categories. Read it alongside the category count, not on its own.
▶Water 77
~4,000 protests forced withdrawal of the water-rights application on 5/7/2026: a binding adverse action driven by this concern alone. But read the digital number carefully: it is a Great Salt Lake argument, not a local supply one, and belongs almost entirely to statewide salience rather than to local sentiment.
▶Zoning / Process 71
The dominant public-record concern. A 3-0 approval taken in front of ~1,000 people with no public comment period; land-use authority ceded to a state authority for 50 years; a referendum denied on administrative grounds; three active lawsuits; both approving commissioners and the Senate President defeated in the 6/23/2026 primaries.
▶Disclosure accuracy (provisional) 66
PROVISIONAL. The developer's own figures conflict by orders of magnitude across his own channels: Phase 1 at 1.5, 3 and 7.5 GW; investment at $100B, 'over $1B' and $20M spent; water at 1,900, 3,500 and 13,000 acre-feet. The House Speaker publicly contradicted O'Leary's claim to have met with him.
▶Official Intimidation / Civic Safety (provisional) 65
PROVISIONAL, and the strongest instance yet. A sitting senator smacked a reporter's phone from his hand and the police issued the news crew a trespass notice. The developer claimed on national television that opposition was Chinese-funded, retracted it six weeks later without evidence, and is now a defendant in a federal defamation suit brought by those opponents. Counter-signal: 19 comments in the same corpus carry sabotage or violence ideation from the opposition side. That cuts the other way and should be scored separately, not folded in.
▶Anti-corporate sentiment 54
Two vectors: O'Leary personally, and a captured-government argument naming the governor, the Senate President and a $135,000 PAC donation. Largely non-transferable to a different developer, but the government-capture half would survive.
▶Wildlife / Land 53
The Locomotive Springs parcel was excised from the footprint in the 6/4/2026 acreage cut, a concession driven by this concern specifically. The high-volume digital material is scale rhetoric (40,000 acres versus Disney World) rather than habitat harm; true wildlife concern is only about six items.
▶Jobs / Economic Benefit Credibility 50
2,000 permanent jobs claimed; the Associated General Contractors and a Brookings study of 770 data centers put realistic county-wide gains far lower. The $100M county return is argued to be arithmetically incompatible with a 96% abatement. Eagle Mountain's post-Meta property tax rise is the reference case Utahns cite.
▶Electricity / Grid Rate Impact 48
SB132 already requires large loads not to shift costs to other ratepayers, and the governor's 5/29/2026 executive order names ratepayer protection. Digital argument runs second-order (gas demand to gas price to electricity price) rather than as observed bill shock.
▶Health 36
Air quality and lakebed dust. Almost entirely Wasatch Front-framed (inversion, 'the valley') rather than Box Elder-framed, which is itself the market's defining feature.
▶Anti-AI sentiment 30
Morning Consult polling (5/15-18/2026, n=802) put statewide opposition at 53% against 30% support, with roughly 70% across parties saying the benefits do not outweigh water and energy costs.
▶NDAs / Secrecy 26
Landowner NDAs are reported and the entity structure is undisclosed, but note the digital corpus contains zero uses of the word 'NDA': what residents actually allege is that the project was kept quiet, which is a weaker and different claim.
▶Property Values 12
All four digital items are Wasatch Front and route through lakebed dust rather than project proximity. No Box Elder homeowner mentions their own property value.
▶Noise 12
Entirely speculative and entirely from non-residents. Not one comment reports or anticipates noise from personal proximity.
▶Traffic 8
One passing mention in 1,617 comments, and only as an item in a list of studies not performed, notable given how exhaustive the corpus is otherwise.
No Evidence Found
Unknown, not absent. These categories were checked and the record did not settle them.