- Utah to be home to new 40,000-acre data center
- Data center will consume more energy than the entire state
- Electricity will be supplied by turbogenerators burning natural gas.
The Box Elder County Commission in Utah has approved a massive new data center that, when completed, will be twice the size of Manhattan and consume more electricity than the entire state currently does.
The Stratos artificial intelligence data center will occupy more than 40,000 acres (62 square miles) in northwest Utah and consume 9 GW of energy.
Nearly 4,000 local residents and environmentalists strongly opposed the proposed data center, pointing out that the data center would draw water and increase temperatures in an already drought-stricken region.
The data center raises ecological concerns
Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist and Shark tank star, supports the project and has made several statements to try to allay concerns about the development.
Talk to Fox NewsSaid O’Leary: “I don’t think there’s a site bigger than this. It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world that we’re not kidding, that we’re going to get this done, move it forward and provide the computing power to our AI companies that defend the country.”
The Chinese are probably not the project’s opponents’ biggest concern. Many worry about the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, already threatened by recurring drought and water diversions intended for agriculture. The data center would likely divert more water from the lake, unless developers plan to source cooling water from outside the county.
“We’re not going to drain the Great Salt Lake. That’s ridiculous. We’re going to create additional jobs,” O’Leary said in an article on X. Evidence from other projects suggests that local job growth in data centers is short-term and almost entirely construction-based.
For those concerned about the site’s energy consumption, O’Leary said, “We’re building electricity from scratch, from the pipeline. We’re going to burn it with turbines, cleanly.” For the uninitiated, natural gas is a fossil fuel and burning it produces pollutants that have contributed to human-caused climate change.
Gas turbines also exhibit a second, lesser-known phenomenon. Each turbine operates like a commercial jet engine, but produces electricity. Given that the data center will have a power consumption of 9 GW when completed, the campus will likely be as noisy as a major airport. In several cases, infrasound produced by data centers has sickened local residents.
O’Leary also claimed in a video on X that data center opponents were “professional protesters” paid to oppose the project.
A group called Box Elder Accountability Referendum has called for a referendum on the decision to build the data center. If the referendum is signed by all 5,422 registered voters in the county within 45 days, another vote will take place 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.”
Via The guardian
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