- Utah will be the home of a new 40,000 acre datacenter
- The datacenter will consume more power than the entire state
- The power will be provided with natural gas burning turbine generators
Box Elder county commission in Utah has approved an enormous new data center that, upon completion, will be twice the size of Manhattan and consume more electricity than the entire state currently does.
The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter will occupy more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) in north-western Utah and consume 9GW of power.
Nearly 4,000 local residents and environmentalists have objected strongly to the proposed datacenter, pointing out that the datacenter will pull water and raise temperatures in an already drought-hit region.
Datacenter raises ecological concerns
Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist and Shark Tank star, is backing the project, and has made several statements in an attempt to quell concerns about the development.
Speaking to Fox News, O’Leary said, “I don’t think there’s a bigger site in the world than this. 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.”
The Chinese likely aren’t the greatest concern for those opposing the project. Many are concerned about the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, which is already under threat from a recurrent drought and agricultural water diversions. The datacenter would likely divert more water from the lake, unless the developers are planning to source cooling water from outside the county.
“We’re not gonna drain the Great Salt Lake. That’s ridiculous. We are gonna create incremental jobs,” O’Leary said in a post on X. Evidence from other projects suggests that local job growth from data centers is short term, and almost entirely construction-based.
For those worried about the energy consumption of the site, O’Leary said, “We are building power from scratch, from the pipeline. We are going to burn it with turbines, clean.” For the uninitiated, natural gas is a fossil fuel, and burning produces pollutants that have contributed to man-made climate change.
Gas turbines also present a second, less well known phenomenon. Each turbine operates like a commercial jet engine, but instead produces electricity. As the data center will have a 9GW energy consumption when it is completed, the campus will likely be as loud as a large airport. In several instances, the infrasound produced by datacenters has made local residents sick.
O’Leary has also claimed in a video on X that those opposed to the data center are “professional protestors” being paid to object to the project.
A group called the Box Elder Accountability Referendum has applied for a referendum on the decision to build the data center. If the referendum is signed by the 5,422 registered voters in the county within 45 days, another vote will be held 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.”
Via The Guardian
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
