How chilli helped Caroline Gleich turn Stratos into a national fight in just five weeks!
what's at stake
Stratos is a proposed AI data center campus in Utah backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary. Early plans showed a 40,000 acre project - about 3 times the size of Manhattan. This put Stratos far beyond the scale of ordinary hyperscale data centers, and turned one local water fight into a national warning sign for unchecked AI infrastructure.
40,000 acres proposed in Box Elder County, Utah
set to generate up to 9 gigawatts of power while consuming more than double Utah's current statewide electricity use
1,900 acre-feet of water tied to the first water-change application
3,900 public protests filed against the water application
a project routed through MIDA, a military development authority, raising serious questions about public review and local control
risks to the Great Salt Lake, local wetlands, air quality, water supplies, and public trust
the mission
Caroline Gleich wanted to make sure Stratos could not move forward quietly.
The strategy was to turn a local Utah fight into coordinated public pressure on the political approvals, water access, public legitimacy, and investor confidence the project needed to keep moving forward.
- act local: back Utah residents demanding water scrutiny, public hearings, county accountability, and a real democratic process.
- follow the money: pressure insurers, brokers, AI companies, and possible customers before they helped make Stratos bankable.
- challenge the story: push back on Kevin O'Leary's media narrative and get journalists, broadcasters, and public officials to ask harder questions.
how Caroline spiced it up with chilli
Caroline and chilli worked together to turn one local fight into a full pressure map: 38 targeted actions across 8 pressure points (legislative, investors, insurance, media…) combining Caroline’s leadership with chilli’s campaign expertise to reach the officials, agencies, developers, investors, and public audiences Stratos needed on its side.
- 12K+ actions taken
- 1,5K+ supporters
- 10K emails sent
- 221 social comments posted
Caroline's supporters on chilli emailed Box Elder County officials, Utah water authorities, MIDA, state auditors, legislators, congressional offices, insurers, brokers, and possible Big Tech customers. They filed public comments, backed local meeting pressure, checked voter registration, posted public comments to Kevin O'Leary, and asked media platforms to stop giving Stratos an easy ride.
This is what chilli is built for: one creator, one urgent fight, dozens of coordinated ways for people to act from their phone.
the impact
Within five weeks of Caroline's Stratos campaign going live on chilli, the project went from a quiet approval track to a public fight that helped push a 75% scale-down, from 40,000 acres to around 10,000.
The pressure worked fast. What started as a local approval process became a visible backlash over water, power, and whether communities get a real say when a massive data center project lands on their doorstep.
- The original water application was withdrawn after around 3,900 public protests were filed.
- A second water-rights application was also withdrawn after nearly 700 more formal protests.
- Utah Senate President Stuart Adams publicly called for a 75% reduction in the project footprint, from 40,000 acres to around 10,000 acres.
- Kevin O'Leary said his team was working to comply with the 75% reduction request.
- The Hill reported that O'Leary was shrinking the Utah data center "after backlash" and quoted him saying, "I have no choice."
- The Guardian covered the project as a major Utah backlash story, citing nearly 4,000 objections, water concerns, public meetings, and a referendum push.
The fight is still live. But this was already a real brake on the project. In just over a month, Caroline and chilli helped scale local resistance into national pressure, pushing Stratos from a quiet approval process into a public fight it could not ignore.
