Valar Atomics Plans 9.4GW SMR Data Center Campus Near Price
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A filing that reframes Carbon County
As first reported by Data Center Dynamics, citing NPR and the Salt Lake Tribune, Valar Atomics has submitted plans to federal regulators for a data center campus near Price in Carbon County, roughly 199 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The project, called Project Beehive, would sit on more than 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management ground, with another 650 acres coming from state trust land. The company envisions 456 small modular reactors on site, totaling as much as 9.6GW of capacity, alongside a nuclear fuel facility and waste storage.
For a region where land has traded for grazing and energy leases, this is a different kind of buyer showing up with a different kind of appetite. Carbon County's commercial land market has had almost no comparable transactions to benchmark against, and now it has one that dwarfs anything on record statewide.
Who holds the land, and what it's suddenly worth
The fact that state trust lands are part of this deal matters beyond the acreage. Utah's Trust Lands Administration manages land for the benefit of public schools and institutions, and a lease or sale tied to a multi-gigawatt data campus changes the revenue math for those beneficiaries in a way a grazing lease never could. That detail surfaced in a recent Trust Lands Administration meeting, not in a press release, which tells you this is moving through real channels, not just investor messaging.
Federal land still has to clear the National Environmental Policy Act process, and BLM's Utah office has confirmed only that it is reviewing the application "for completeness." That's an early-stage checkpoint, not an approval. Investors and landowners near Price and Wellington are already fielding calls, and brokers at Team Utah Commercial have started hearing from landowners in the region asking what their parcels might be worth if even a fraction of this build-out proceeds. The honest answer right now is that nobody has a clean comp.
Two different power bets, six miles apart
Project Beehive isn't the only large energy-for-compute play staking ground in Carbon County. Altigen Energy has filed with the county for "Jurassic Spark," a 1,200-acre natural gas-powered data center site east of Wellington, about six miles from Price. That project starts at 250MW and is designed to scale to 3GW — smaller than Valar's nuclear ambitions, but on a conventional fuel source with a much shorter path to commercial precedent.
Having two power-hungry data center projects targeting the same six-mile stretch signals that whoever is scouting Utah sites sees something specific in this corridor: available land, transmission access, and a county government willing to entertain industrial-scale energy infrastructure. Gas turbines are a known quantity; Valar's Generation IV high-temperature gas reactor design is not. The company says its 5MW Ward 250 unit completed a zero-power criticality demonstration in Emery County in June and ran a single Nvidia GPU off a test reactor in July. Those are real engineering milestones, but no company anywhere has put an SMR into commercial operation. That gap between demonstrated and deployed is the central risk in Valar's timeline.
The schedule assumes nothing goes wrong
Valar's public timeline has construction starting by the end of this year, first reactors online in 2028, and full build-out by 2032. For a project still in NEPA review, with reactor technology that hasn't reached commercial status anywhere in the world, that's an aggressive sequence. Valar told NPR that "no construction begins before permits and approvals," which is the right answer but also the one every developer gives before a permitting timeline slips.
What's worth tracking is not whether Beehive gets built at 9.6GW — that's a multi-year question — but whether the BLM review surfaces a public comment period substantial enough to slow the schedule, and whether Valar's reactor design clears any additional regulatory testing before 2028. Either of those could reset expectations for land absorption in Carbon County well before a single reactor is poured. Landowners near Price should treat the current interest as real, but treat 2032 build-out numbers as a ceiling, not a baseline.
Source: this analysis discusses reporting by Data Center Dynamics.
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