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Kevin O’Leary’s Two Data Centres Are So Big They (Almost) Defy Comprehension

Making sense of the very large Wonder Valley project in Alberta and the even bigger Stratos plan in Utah

New data centres are being announced all over North America—and beyond. Some provide power at a smaller scale, but others (sometimes referred to as “hyperscale”) provide the necessary power for large-scale cloud service providers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These, in turn, provide the necessary compute for artificial intelligence platforms.

The demand for these services is growing, as is their footprint. The University of Calgary counted 239 data centres across Canada at the moment, including 105 in Ontario, thirty-five in Quebec, and twenty-two in Alberta. If we want to include planned projects not yet operational, this number goes up to 309, according to reporting by The Logic published last month. According to the Canada Energy Regulator, Canada’s data centres alone could demand up to twelve gigawatts (GW) of power by 2050—which, for context, is the amount of power used by the whole province of Alberta at peak times.

Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary has taken a special interest. In 2024, his venture capital firm O’Leary Ventures announced the creation of a new data centre in Alberta, called “Wonder Valley”—likely a play on his “Mr. Wonderful” moniker. Then, this year, O’Leary announced a second data centre project in Utah, called “Stratos” (and sometimes, confusingly, called “Wonder Valley” as well).

To make sense of the size and impact of these projects, here’s what you need to know:

How big will these projects be?

When Wonder Valley was announced in 2024, it was being touted as the world’s largest AI data centre industrial park—at an estimated 7,000 acres. But other projects have had the same idea, and Wonder Valley is no longer on track to set a world record. Still, we can expect it to be the largest data centre in Canada by a significant margin.

O’Leary cites Alberta’s “ideal cold-weather climate,” “highly skilled labour force,” “pro-business policies,” and “attractive tax regime” as reasons why it’s a suitable home for such a massive project.

Stratos, in Utah, will include 40,000 acres of private land and an additional 1,200 acres of military and state-owned land, or 41,200 acres altogether. Announced in February 2026, Stratos is projected to be twice the size of Manhattan—making it, for now, the largest data centre in the world.

Presently, the world’s largest operational data centre, located in Inner Mongolia, is 245 acres—a tiny fraction of how massive these projects are envisioned to be.

How........

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