"Irresponsible": backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

 

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.        

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.   

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up. “At a time when the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis, approving a project that will consume water and energy at this scale is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Franque Bains, director of the Sierra Club’s Utah chapter. “Utahns want to see the Great Salt Lake restored, not stripped.”

The proposed project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist who appears on the TV show Shark Tank and recently played a villainous tycoon in the movie Marty Supreme. O’Leary has claimed Stratos will deliver thousands of jobs and help the US compete with China in the burgeoning AI industry.

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

In an X post, O’Leary added: “We’re not gonna drain the Great Salt Lake. That’s ridiculous. We are gonna create incremental jobs.” But these jobs will not outweigh the longer-term impacts to Utah and beyond, critics argue. Stratos is expected to raise the state’s planet-heating pollution by about 50% by consuming a huge amount of energy and water to power and cool itself, according to one impact analysis.

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time 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 thermal load from the proposed Stratos project is extreme,” Davies said. “Of course it has effects. One of those effects is this: this facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse.”

O’Leary said the extra electricity demand won’t raise residents’ energy bills as new gas-fired generation will power the facility. “We are building power from scratch, from the pipeline,” he said. “We are going to burn it with turbines, clean,” he added, although gas is a fossil fuel that is dangerously overheating the world and isn’t clean.

Nearly 4,000 people have lodged objections to the project being approved, with this pushback leading to contentious public meetings that Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.

O’Leary has claimed in social media posts that most of the protesters don’t live locally and have been paid to object to the project. “There are professional protesters that are paid by somebody, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X last week. “They’re being bused in.”

Opponents of the project have rejected this accusation. On Monday, a group calling itself the Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed an application for a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

“Instead of speaking with us, Kevin O’Leary went on social media saying we were out-of-state, paid protesters, and we don’t want people from out-of-state making decisions for us,” said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum push.

“The only thing he’s right about is that we don’t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.”

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting 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 to 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 datacenters across the US has been championed by Donald Trump’s administration and the AI industry but has been met with local unrest. Anger at growing electricity bills and fears of water depletion have helped spur several local and state election victories for candidates skeptical of the AI sector’s unfettered growth.

Faced with a similar public backlash in Utah, Spencer Cox, the state’s governor, on Friday said he will require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills. The developers will build the datacenter in phases, he said, initially spanning 2,000 acres before scaling up further subject to future reviews.

“Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability,” Cox said. Last year, the governor asked people in Utah to pray and fast to help break fierce drought conditions.

“Industry is our state’s motto,” Cox added on Friday. “And in our pursuit of economic strength, we must always ensure that development is thoughtful and in line with Utah values.”

-The Guardian