In May 2026, the UK's AI Security Institute published a finding worth pausing on. The length of complex cybersecurity tasks that frontier AI models can complete on their own has been doubling roughly every four to five months. see the evidence
The newest models — Claude Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5 — blew past that already-accelerated trend. Both completed multi-hour expert-level offensive cyber tasks at near-100% success rates. One of them solved a 32-step simulated corporate network attack that no prior model had ever finished.
This is the world we now live in. The question is not whether powerful AI exists. It does. The question is who builds the infrastructure that runs it, who sets the standards, and who has the compute capacity to defend against the same capabilities being developed by adversaries who feel no obligation to slow down.
01 / The Upside Is Not HypotheticalThe case for building these systems
Critics often talk about AI as a future risk to be feared. The benefits are already here and worth being specific about.
Medicine
AI imaging models are running in radiology departments at major hospitals today, catching early-stage cancers that the human eye misses. Drug discovery pipelines that historically took a decade are being compressed to a few years. The first AI-designed drugs are now in human clinical trials. None of this is speculative. the receipts
Science and the economy
Protein folding was a fifty-year unsolved problem. AlphaFold solved enough of it that researchers can now design proteins from scratch — the foundation for new vaccines, materials, and enzymes. Climate models, weather forecasting, battery chemistry, fusion containment — AI is now the leading research instrument in fields that used to take entire careers to advance. expand
Cybersecurity, in particular
This one deserves attention. Modern enterprise security cannot run at human speed anymore. The volume of telemetry, the speed of attacks, and the sophistication of the adversary all require AI on the defending side. The defenders who have the best models win. The ones who don't, lose. the defender case
02 / Why This Requires Compute at ScaleYou cannot do this on a laptop
Training a frontier AI model is one of the most computationally demanding tasks humans have ever attempted. The current generation of models requires tens of thousands of specialized chips running for months. The next generation will require an order of magnitude more.
This is not a software problem. It is a steel, concrete, electricity, and cooling problem. Whichever country builds the physical infrastructure to support the next decade of training runs gets to define the safety standards, the deployment policies, and the commercial terms for the rest of the world. why scale matters
You will see people online say America has 5,400 data centers to China's 400, and use that to argue we're already ahead. That comparison is misleading because it counts every facility — corporate storage, social media servers, video streaming caches, cloud apps. The number that actually matters for the AI race is the count of frontier AI training campuses. By that measure (per the AI Data Center Index, May 2026): the United States has 84 tracked AI facilities with 70.6 GW of capacity. China has 7 facilities with 2.5 GW. The US lead is enormous. It is also fragile — China is building gigawatt-scale AI campuses on aggressive timelines while domestic permitting in the US can take years. read the comparison
03 / What Stratos Actually IsThe project, on the record
Stratos is the proposed AI compute campus in Hansel Valley, Box Elder County, Utah. It is being developed by O'Leary Digital — yes, that Kevin O'Leary — as part of a larger initiative called Wonder Valley that also includes a sister site in Alberta.
The Utah project area covers about 40,000 acres of mostly unincorporated land. The data center buildings themselves will only sit on a small fraction of that — Phase 1 is capped at a 2,000-acre footprint, and even at full buildout the campus structures occupy a sliver of the total acreage. The rest is buffer, utility corridors, on-site power generation, and undeveloped land. full specs and history
How the phases work
Governor Cox attached an important condition to the project: it cannot be built all at once. The phases are gated, with reviews and clear metrics required after each stage before the next gets approved.
- →Phase 1: capped at 1.5 GW, confined to 2,000 acres. Phase 1 alone is a roughly $4 billion buildout on top of $1 billion in site preparation.
- →Early phases scaling: approaches 3 GW at a cost approaching $20 billion, contingent on the Phase 1 review.
- →Full buildout: 7.5 to 9 GW depending on which figure you read (Gensler renderings show 7.5; MIDA's executive director cites 9), spread over a decade or more.
The phases will not be running the same technology
This is worth saying directly because it tends to get lost in the debate. Phase 1 will be built with 2026-2027 generation chips and cooling. Phase 2, if it gets approved, will use whatever exists at that time — probably more efficient silicon, better cooling, possibly novel power sources. Phase 3 is far enough out that some of the technology may not exist yet. Orbital compute, advanced nuclear, and architectures we cannot yet describe are all in the realm of plausible. The phased gating is a feature, not a bug — it forces the project to justify itself against the technology of the moment, not the technology of 2026.
Phased buildout also means Phase 1 approval is not approval of the full 9 GW. State air quality review, water rights adjudication, and the Design Review Committee still have to weigh in on every stage. The original water rights application was withdrawn and the new application is now under review. The county received a $16.2 million upfront commitment from the developer to offset initial impacts.
This is what's actually on the table. A lot of the public debate has been about a project that does not match the one being built.
04 / The Real Concerns, Taken SeriouslyWhere the opposition has a point — and where it doesn't
Water
This is the strongest concern and deserves the most honest engagement. Northern Utah is in drought. The Great Salt Lake is in crisis. Any large industrial water user in this basin has to be scrutinized.
The Stratos design uses hybrid closed-loop cooling, which recirculates the same coolant continuously instead of evaporating it. The difference matters enormously. Existing Utah data centers tell the story: NSA Bluffdale uses about 126 million gallons of water per year on mostly evaporative cooling. Novva's closed-loop campus in West Jordan uses about 3 million gallons for similar capacity — over 40 times less. Stratos is being designed in the Novva tradition, with treated water returned to the local aquifer that feeds the Great Salt Lake.
Oracle has published detailed designs for closed-loop cooling in its AI data centers. Microsoft is piloting zero-water-cooling in Arizona and Wisconsin. NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, entering production in late 2026, runs on 113°F warm water — hot enough to eliminate chillers entirely. By the time Stratos Phase 2 is being built, that is likely the standard. The original Stratos water rights application was withdrawn precisely because the developer agreed the first version did not meet the bar. That is the system working. the full water analysis
Heat and the "23 atom bombs a day" claim
The same Utah State physicist quoted on the 16 GW figure has argued that the campus would release waste heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs per day, raise local nighttime temperatures by up to 28°F, and turn Hansel Valley into a Sahara-like desert. That number has now traveled in Futurism, Rolling Stone, and across social media. It deserves a careful response, because the math behind it is a rhetorical sleight of hand and the substantive answer is more interesting than the framing.
On the math: 23 "Hiroshima-sized bombs" of waste heat per day works out to about 14 kilotons of TNT each — the smallest nuclear weapon ever built, and roughly 1/3,500th the size of the largest bomb ever tested. The largest hydrogen bomb in history released, in one second, about 150 times more energy than the entire daily output Davies is describing. The Sun delivers more energy to Earth every 90 seconds than Stratos would release over its entire decade-plus operational life. The "atomic bomb" unit is designed to feel alarming, not to inform.
On the substance: waste heat from data centers is recoverable and increasingly required to be recovered. Stockholm's Data Parks program uses waste heat from over 20 data centers to warm 30,000 apartments. Denmark's Orbis data center exports 165,000 MWh of heat per year, supplying nearly 11,000 homes. Microsoft is building the world's largest data center heat recovery scheme outside Helsinki to heat the city of Espoo. Germany now requires waste heat reuse. California's Title 24 is the first US state mandate. NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform produces outlet water at temperatures specifically suited for greenhouse, agricultural, and district-heating uses downstream. The same warm-water cooling that eliminates chillers also makes the waste heat economically useful for the first time. the full heat analysis
Air quality and emissions
The site sits outside the Wasatch Front non-attainment zone, but emissions do not respect zoning lines. Phase 1 natural gas turbines will produce nitrogen oxides and CO2. The Utah Division of Air Quality has not yet completed its review, and it should. This is a legitimate area for public input.
What rarely gets mentioned is what's coming behind Phase 1. The Allam-Fetvedt Cycle, developed by 8 Rivers and commercialized by NET Power, burns natural gas with pure oxygen and uses supercritical CO2 as the working fluid. Byproducts: liquid water and a stream of pipeline-ready CO2. Atmospheric emissions: essentially zero. A 50 MW demonstration plant has been delivering power to the ERCOT grid since 2021. Commercial 280-300 MW plants are under development now. Carbon-capture-ready turbine design at Stratos means capture equipment can be added when the economics permit. Small modular reactors from NuScale, X-energy, Kairos, and others are in NRC review, with first commercial operation expected 2028-2030. The Phase 2 and Phase 3 generation mix will not look like the Phase 1 mix. expand
The "actually it will use 16 gigawatts" claim
A Utah State physics professor was quoted in Rolling Stone arguing the campus will actually consume closer to 16 GW because natural gas generation is thermodynamically inefficient. That number has been widely repeated. Whether the professor's full analysis was captured fairly by the publication is its own question — Rolling Stone has an editorial slant and selective quoting is not uncommon — so what follows responds to the framing as reported.
The thermodynamics is real. Every gas turbine loses energy as heat in fuel-to-electricity conversion. What the framing misses: the same loss applies to every gas plant in the grid. Modern hyperscale facilities run at PUE ratios of 1.09 to 1.20 versus 1.5 to 1.8 for traditional enterprise data centers. AI chip efficiency improves roughly 30% per generation. NVIDIA's 800-volt DC architecture, shipping now, cuts power-chain losses by up to 60% by eliminating multiple conversion steps. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling cuts cooling overhead dramatically. Dry cooling eliminates evaporative water use entirely in dry climates. Each phase of Stratos will be built with whatever is most efficient at that moment. the full efficiency breakdown
The "this is just for surveilling Americans" claim
This is one of the loudest opposition framings, picked up by Books Behind Borders, NaturalNews, SHTF Plan, and a layer of social media accounts. The framing: Stratos is a giant surveillance facility being snuck through MIDA authority to spy on US citizens. It is worth taking the claim seriously and looking at whether the infrastructure profile actually fits the accusation.
It doesn't, and not by a small margin. The NSA's Utah Data Center at Bluffdale — the country's actual flagship signals-intelligence facility, the one a Greenpeace blimp famously flew over in 2014 with "Illegal Spying Below" painted on it — runs at roughly 100 to 150 megawatts of total power. Stratos at full buildout is 7,500 to 9,000 megawatts. That is 50 to 90 times larger than the facility that actually does the work critics are accusing Stratos of being built to do. No surveillance program in any country needs that much compute. Bulk telephone metadata, internet traffic interception, and pattern-of-life analysis are large workloads, but they're not gigawatt-scale-AI-training workloads. The shape is wrong.
And surveillance does not require US soil to begin with. The Five Eyes intelligence partnership already conducts signals collection from facilities in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, plus overseas SIGINT stations around the world. The legal architecture for collecting on Americans through allied partners has existed for decades. Building a 9 GW campus in northern Utah specifically to surveil US citizens would be the most expensive and least efficient way to do something that is already being done elsewhere on much smaller infrastructure.
The actual DoD connection at Stratos is something different and worth being honest about: a senior Air Force official requested that MIDA identify locations to expand military computing capacity, and Stratos was structured as a response to that request. That is AI training and inference for defense applications — pattern recognition in satellite imagery, logistics optimization, cyber defense, autonomous systems research — which is the kind of workload that genuinely benefits from gigawatt-scale GPU compute. Most of the campus, in practice, will serve commercial AI customers (hyperscalers, labs, enterprise), with revenue partially flowing back to military infrastructure under the MIDA arrangement. That is a legitimate policy question. It is not a domestic spying program. the full breakdown
05 / Why This Is PersonalMy heart, my kids, and what AI is actually doing
People ask how AI actually helps people's health. Let me tell you from my own life.
At 40 years old, with my wife seven months pregnant with our fourth child, I had emergency heart bypass surgery. The cause wasn't diet. It wasn't sedentary living. It wasn't anything the standard cardiac risk score would have flagged. The cause was lipoprotein(a) — Lp(a) — a genetically inherited cholesterol-like particle that drives aggressive atherosclerosis and that statins and most standard cholesterol medications cannot meaningfully lower.
About one in five people worldwide carry elevated Lp(a). That is roughly 1.4 billion people. Most of them have no idea. The American Heart Association now recommends a one-time test for every adult, and almost nobody is getting tested. I found out the hard way, with my chest open on an operating table.
For most of medical history, there was nothing to do about it. You knew you had it, you took aggressive measures on everything else (LDL, blood pressure, lifestyle), and you hoped.
That is changing because of AI.
Five drugs are now in late-stage clinical trials specifically to lower Lp(a) — pelacarsen, olpasiran, lepodisiran, zerlasiran, and an oral small-molecule called muvalaplin. In Phase 2 trials, these drugs reduced Lp(a) by 80 to 98 percent. Most of them are antisense oligonucleotides or small interfering RNAs that silence the LPA gene at the source, before the dangerous particle even gets produced. The Phase 3 cardiovascular outcomes data from the Lp(a) HORIZON trial, the first cardiovascular outcomes trial ever conducted for an Lp(a)-lowering therapy, is reading out this year.
AI is woven into how these drugs were designed. Machine learning platforms helped researchers identify which RNA sequences would bind most precisely to the LPA gene. Predictive models accelerated the screening of candidate compounds. Computational biology helped optimize delivery — figuring out how to get the drug specifically into liver cells where Lp(a) is produced. Generative protein and nucleic acid design tools, the same kind of work that earned a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold in 2024, are now being applied to the next generation of cardiovascular therapies.
I am over 20 years out from my bypass. I am still here. The daughter I almost didn't see is now 20 years old. I want to walk her down the aisle. I want to be there for the grandkids I haven't met yet. AI-driven cardiovascular research is one of the reasons I think those things are possible.
Beyond the trials, AI is becoming the most useful tool I have for managing my own health — and it has stopped looking like a search engine and started looking like a research assistant that works while I sleep. I have agents scanning ClinicalTrials.gov on a schedule, watching for new Lp(a) studies I might qualify for and alerting me when enrollment opens. When I get new lab work, I hand it over and the system cross-references my values against my baseline trends, current cardiology guidelines, and recent journal literature — flagging anything that has drifted or any interaction with what I am currently taking. I have it monitoring the pipeline of cardiovascular research for me, surfacing relevant preprints and trial readouts as they happen rather than waiting for me to search. It builds exercise programs that respect my cardiac history and adjusts them as my data changes. It cross-checks supplements and medications for interactions. It is not a glorified search engine — it is an autonomous layer working continuously in the background on my behalf. None of this replaces my cardiologist. It makes me the most informed patient who walks into his office, and it catches questions I would not have known to ask.
This is what AI infrastructure is actually for. The compute that runs at Stratos and the other AI campuses being built across America is the same compute that trains the models that design these drugs, that reads the medical literature, that compares my labs against millions of similar patients, that helps researchers find the next class of therapy. Every additional gigawatt of American AI capacity is, downstream, more lives saved from diseases that used to be untreatable.
AI is not the enemy. It is turning genetic risks that were once death sentences into manageable conditions. For people like me with Lp(a), for the other 1.4 billion of us out there, this is not abstract — it is the difference between watching our kids grow up and not.
That is why I support building. That is why I support Stratos. And it is why I think the people opposing it deserve a clearer picture than the one they have been given — including a clearer picture of who is giving it to them.
06 / Who Is Organizing the OppositionFrom a federal data-center moratorium bill down to your county commission meeting
Most of the people showing up to Box Elder County Commission meetings are sincere. They have wells, ranches, kids, and a justified skepticism of large-scale industrial projects. They deserve honest answers — and they have not been getting them. The framing they are hearing about Stratos has not bubbled up from Hansel Valley. It has been built top-down by a national political project, then pushed down through state, regional, and local layers until it reaches the county fairgrounds. Here is what that project actually looks like.
The federal layer: Sanders, AOC, and a national data-center moratorium bill
On March 25, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act of 2026. The bill would impose a nationwide halt on construction or upgrading of AI data centers until Congress passes federal legislation regulating AI. It would also ban exports of advanced AI chips to countries lacking equivalent regulations. In Sanders's words at the introduction press conference: "we cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity."
This is not a fringe gesture. The bill names AI infrastructure as the political target. It would, if passed, freeze Stratos and every other proposed AI campus in the country. Senator John Fetterman called the bill a "China First" policy. The bill is unlikely to pass this Congress. The political project around it is not designed to pass legislation — it is designed to shift the Overton window so that local approvals like Box Elder County's become politically toxic. The bill is the strategic anchor; opposing Stratos is the tactical execution. expand
The state layer: at least 11 states with data-center pause proposals
Lawmakers in at least 11 states have proposed moratoriums or pauses on data-center construction, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Senators Markey and Warren are separately leading an effort to block any federal preemption of state-level AI regulation — they sent a Dear Colleague letter to Senate Democrats in late 2025 urging unified opposition to a Big Tech-backed AI regulation moratorium in the NDAA. Their framing is that states must retain authority to regulate AI on their own. In practice, that means each state Democratic Party can run its own version of the moratorium fight independent of federal politics, and the state-level apparatus exists to do exactly that.
The funded national-organization layer
The opposition's national messaging has documented funding sources worth knowing about. This is not the same as saying the people repeating the messaging are paid — they aren't. The sincere local resident who shares a Peoples Dispatch article about Stratos is not being funded by anyone. They are repeating a frame that originated upstream, where the funding actually lives.
Neville Roy Singham. Singham is an American tech entrepreneur who sold his consulting firm ThoughtWorks for $785 million in 2017 and now resides in Shanghai. A New York Times investigation in August 2023 tracked hundreds of millions of dollars from Singham-linked entities to a global network of advocacy organizations and media outlets that, in the Times's words, "mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points." Singham has personally attended a Chinese Communist Party workshop on promoting the party internationally, according to NYT reporting, and previously worked as a consultant for Huawei from 2001 to 2008. He denies acting at the direction of the Chinese government.
One of the most prominent organizations in his funded network is Peoples Dispatch — the same publication whose framing of Stratos as a fight over "who controls the infrastructure behind the AI economy" has been reproduced across opposition coverage. The People's Forum, a Manhattan-based organization funded by Singham and his wife Jodie Evans (co-founder of CODEPINK), publicly acknowledged receiving over $20 million from them between 2017 and 2022 through shell companies and donor-advised funds, according to a September 2025 House Ways and Means investigation. BreakThrough News, No Cold War, and several Party for Socialism and Liberation-aligned media projects sit in the same network. These are some of the outlets producing the framings that get picked up and shared by sincere local opponents who have no idea where the talking points came from.
Hansjörg Wyss. Separately, an April 2026 American Energy Institute report identified twelve organizations actively opposing US data-center development that have collectively received more than $39 million in funding from foreign donors based in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. The most prominent named donor: Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, whose Berger Action Fund channels his personal fortune (Wyss, as a foreign national, is barred by US law from donating directly to American candidates or political committees) through dark-money vehicles including the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Top recipient organizations include Indivisible, 350.org, Oil Change International, GAIA, the Sierra Club, and Americans for Financial Reform — mainstream environmental and advocacy groups whose underlying missions are entirely legitimate, and most of whose individual members are sincere.
The point of naming this funding is not to claim that the rancher at the commission meeting is on someone's payroll. She isn't. The point is that the messaging she is sharing — the Peoples Dispatch frame, the moratorium-bill language, the "billionaires versus working people" framing — was authored upstream by organizations that are funded, in part, by foreign-resident billionaires routing money through American dark-money vehicles. Sincere people parroting top-down-funded messaging is a normal feature of every political fight, on the left and the right. It is worth knowing when it is happening. the money trail
The local layer: state parties, DSA, PSL, Peoples Dispatch
At the bottom of the funnel, the framing reaching residents in Hansel Valley comes through a specific set of channels. The coverage describing Stratos as a fight over "who controls the infrastructure behind the AI economy" comes from Peoples Dispatch, a publication tied to the international socialist movement. The Democratic Socialists of America have active Utah chapters involved in organizing. The Party for Socialism and Liberation has published organizing material framing American AI buildout as capitalist consolidation that working people should resist. State Democratic parties in several swing states have adopted anti-AI infrastructure planks. These organizations publish their goals openly — this is not a conspiracy theory.
It is worth knowing that their objection to Stratos is not really about water. It is about private capital allocating large-scale infrastructure at all. A version of Stratos that used 80% less water and emitted nothing would still be opposed by these groups on those grounds. who's saying what at the local level
The Box Elder rancher worried about her well deserves a hearing on the substance. She is not on anyone's payroll, and the point of naming the funding sources above is not to suggest she is. The point is that the framing she is sharing — that Stratos is fundamentally about billionaires versus working people, that the moratorium is the responsible position, that the project should be stopped rather than carefully reviewed — was authored upstream by organizations that are funded, in part, by foreign-resident billionaires. Sincere local people parroting top-down-funded messaging is a normal feature of political fights, and the people doing it are usually doing so in good faith. They still deserve to know whose framing they have picked up.
Engage her concern honestly. Water rights. Air quality. Phased approval. Real review. Treat the substance as substance. Just do not mistake the messaging she is repeating for a spontaneous local consensus when, in fact, two of the largest funders behind the national framing she is echoing live in Shanghai and Geneva, while the infrastructure they want to stop would otherwise be built in Hansel Valley.
Build. Carefully. Honestly. But build.