‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan | Utah

A plan to create one of the world’s largest data centers, a gargantuan project covering an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has sparked a furious public backlash in Utah, amid concerns about its vast energy consumption and impact on the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos AI Data Center footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 square miles) across three locations in Box Elder County in northwest Utah. The facility will require about 9 GW of energy, more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and will draw a significant amount of water from a region that has been hit by a severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by county commissioners, despite thousands of objections filed by Utahns. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could jeopardize the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical habitat for migratory birds, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, exposing residents of nearby Salt Lake City to the possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries.

“At a time when the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis, approving a project that will consume water and energy on such a scale is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Franque Bains, director of the Utah chapter of the Sierra Club. “Utahns want to see the Great Salt Lake restored, not destroyed. »

The proposed project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist who appears on the TV series Shark Tank and who recently played a villainous tycoon in the film Marty Supreme. O’Leary said Stratos would create thousands of jobs and help the United States compete with China in the booming AI sector.

“I don’t think there’s a site bigger than this in the world,” O’Leary told Fox News. “This shows the Chinese and the rest of the world that we are not messing around, that we are going to get this done, get things done and provide the computing power to our AI companies that defend the country.”

In an X post, O’Leary added: “We are not going to drain the Great Salt Lake. This is ridiculous. We are going to create additional jobs.”

But those jobs won’t offset the long-term impacts on Utah and beyond, critics say. According to an impact analysis, Stratos is expected to increase global heating pollution by around 50% by consuming a huge amount of energy and water to power and cool itself.

The industrial-scale fan array needed to cool the data center’s hot pipes will generate so much waste heat that it could increase daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel Valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and nighttime temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

“The heat load of the proposed Stratos project is extreme,” Davies said. “Of course it has effects. One of those effects is: This facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem that is already collapsing.”

O’Leary said the additional demand for electricity will not increase residents’ energy bills because new gas-fired generation will power the facility. “We’re building electricity from scratch, from the pipeline,” he said. “We will burn it with turbines, in a clean way,” he added, although gas is a fossil fuel that is dangerously overheating the planet and is not clean.

Nearly 4,000 people filed objections to the project’s approval, with the refusal leading to contentious public meetings that Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said left him “physically ill” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.

O’Leary claimed in social media posts that most protesters do not live locally and were paid to oppose the project. “There are professional protesters who are paid by someone, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video posted on X last week. “They arrive by bus.”

Opponents of the project rejected this accusation. On Monday, a group calling itself Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed a request for a referendum to overturn the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group can collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county within the next 45 days, approval of the project will be put to a vote in November.

“Instead of talking to us, Kevin O’Leary said on social media that we were paid out-of-state protesters and we didn’t want people from out of state to make decisions for us,” said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum campaign.

“The only thing he is right about is that we don’t want him, a foreign billionaire, to make decisions for us.”

Last week, a new twist occurred when developers withdrew their request to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from the ranch to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application that will be filed with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents say the move is intended to circumvent public disapproval of the project.

“I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this has all the hallmarks of an out-of-state megaproject with little or no concern for the local community,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and executive director of Grow the Flow, a group that aims to protect the Great Salt Lake.

The growth of data centers in the United States has been championed by Donald Trump’s administration and the AI ​​industry, but has been met with local unrest. Anger over rising electricity bills and fears of running out of water have contributed to several local and national election victories by candidates skeptical of the AI ​​sector’s unfettered growth.

Facing a similar public backlash in Utah, Spencer Cox, the state’s governor, said Friday he would demand that the Stratos project not harm the Great Salt Lake or increase electricity bills. Developers will build the data center in stages, he said, initially spanning 2,000 acres before expanding further subject to future reviews..

“Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability,” Cox said. Last year, the governor asked Utahns to pray and fast to help end severe drought conditions.

“Industry is the currency of our state,” Cox added Friday. “And in our quest for economic strength, we must always ensure that development is thoughtful and consistent with Utah values.”