Kevin O'Leary has agreed to scale back his massive Project Stratos data center in Utah, cutting roughly 19,430 acres from the originally planned 40,000-acre footprint following pressure from local officials and activists. In a letter dated Thursday to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, the Shark Tank personality and investor committed to trimming the project's footprint, which sits in and around the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area, according to local ABC4 affiliate reporting. The concession comes just days after Adams publicly urged O'Leary to slash the project's size by 75 percent, a reduction that would have brought it down to about 10,000 acres. The trimmed-down version of Project Stratos will still cover around 20,000 acres, an area larger than Manhattan, and O'Leary indicated he will also remove an additional 620 acres from the northeastern portion near the highway. In his letter, O'Leary said he plans to "preserve a majority of the remaining acreage as open space," an apparent attempt to address concerns from environmental groups and residents who have raised alarms about the project's impact on local water supplies, wildlife habitat, and air quality. Adams had also asked O'Leary to adopt water-saving technology and divert any excess water to the Great Salt Lake, which has been shrinking for years amid the region's prolonged drought. The dispute highlights the growing tension between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and the communities hosting these enormous facilities. Even a 20,000-acre campus is staggering by industry standards, and data centers of far more modest size have already drawn scrutiny for their heavy energy consumption, environmental footprint, and pollution. Utah, like other states, has been racing to attract AI-related investment while grappling with the tradeoffs those projects bring, including strain on water resources in an already arid region. With this partial compromise, O'Leary avoids the deeper cuts Adams initially demanded, but the fight over the project's final scope and its consequences for the surrounding ecosystem is almost certainly far from over.