The scale of data centers is becoming mind-boggling, with one Utah project set to use more energy than the entire rest of the state does.
was largely centered around the way it depicted the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the period so many refer to offhandedly as “lockdown” and the way that policies such as social distancing, masking and public health initiatives were co-opted into the culture war and absorbed into preexisting petty feuds between individuals.
In retrospect, however, it’s the film’s storyline about the development of a nearby “hyperscale data center development” that now feels painfully prescient; the way a small town in rural New Mexico is ultimately bullied and steamrolled into the adoption of a massive development to fuel the nascent AI industry while making life worse for everyone in its vicinity. It’s been less than a year sincehit theaters, and yet in that time the country’s largest proposed data centers have become exponentially, garishly monolithic in scale and impact.
We’re standing on the precipice of a new AI era empowered by single data center projects that, on their own, can consume more electrical powerthey’re built in. These are facilities that make the doom of Eddington, NM and its “tech positive” mayor feel almost quaint.
The poster child for these behemoth data centers would no doubt be the so-called Stratos AI data center in Utah, which would be projected to cover more than 40,000 acres or 62 square miles of space over three different sites in Box Elder County in the state’s northwest corner, bordered by the Great Salt Lake. Combined, that’s an area significantly larger than the overall footprint of Manhattan, and it would indeed consume a megalopolis worth of electricity as well.
It will supposedly require up to 9GW of power in full operation, which would otherwise be enough for roughly 7.8 million households. That’s far moreor consumes on an annual basis, meaning that massive new power-generating facilities will be necessary to bring it online.
It will likewise consume vast amounts of water … and the Great Salt Lake isLiterally thousands of objections have been lodged about the project by residents of Utah, but the Stratos project was approved by the county’s commissioners anyway, despite its potential to devastate the Great Salt Lake’s broader ecosystem and specific habitats for species such as migratory birds. The drying of the lakecreated by toxic fumes from the former lake bed as they now bake in the sun.
The county’s response to a massive number of lodged complaints? That would reportedly be to change the complaint process, towhich must rank as one of the most insidious ways of artificially restraining public dissent that I have ever heard of.
“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 Brigham Young University ecologist Ben Abbott, speakinginvolved in data center construction “the benefit of the doubt” about any of their intentions, and it feels far more likely to me that “he gave them the benefit of the doubt” is the sort of thing that might instead by etched on our tombstones. Oh, did we mention that this entire megaproject is backed byalthough built “incrementally” so it’s okay?
He went on to claim that the complaints were all from “out of state” paid protestors, despite the fact that he is himself an out-of-state venture capitalist tycoon with no connection to Utah whatsoever. Utah charges a $15 fee to submit formal protests complaints & objections against large-scale developments like the proposed Box Elder County data center.
Thousands paid the $15 fee, then developers withdrew the INITIAL application rendering those complaints null & voidSuffice to say, the environmental impact of a project of this size has the potential to be utterly catastrophic. The power sources necessary to support this behemoth data center project, which O’Leary claims will be primarily natural gas burners, couldprojecting that the sheer amount of waste heat produced by industrial-scale fans in the Stratos complex could raise surrounding night-time temperatures in Utah’s Hansel valley by 8-12 degrees Fahrenheit, year round.
Or as Davies concluded: “This facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse. ” One person who knows about that active collapse full well is Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a man who less than a year ago declared a statewide “Day of Prayer and Fasting for Rain,” in which the Utah state governmentand deliver it from crippling drought conditions.
I’m not kidding; that’s actually the substance of daily governmental proclamations in Utah, where your governor instructs you to pray for water, while simultaneouslyof new data centers the size of the country’s biggest metropolises. Or as Cox put it at the time: “Utah is facing a tough season, and we need both divine help and practical action. I invite every Utahn, whatever your faith or belief system, to join me this Sunday in a unified fast and prayer for rain.
” None of this is helped by the fact that wherever one finds a massive data center project being planned, one tends to find local or state lawmakers who stand to reap vast monetary benefits for allowing the projects to continue, resulting in clearly massive conflicts of interest. Look at Louisiana, where Meta intends to build another one of the world’s largest overall data centers, called Hyperion, in the sleepy rural community of Richland Parish.
There, one of the project’s greatest supporters from the beginning, the man who has lobbied regulators for key approvals, cosponsored bills related to the site, and cast votes in its favor, iswho grew up in the Richland Parish area. It’s an area he knows so well, in fact, that Morris owns quite a bit of land throughout Richland Parish … including a handful of parcels that directly border the area that will now become the Hyperion data center, which he has continued to acquire in the last few years as the project was being debated.
And wouldn’t you know it, theof that land is now significantly greater, allowing either Morris or his business partners to sell said land to utility companies for profit, so new methane-burning power plants can be constructed on the grounds. State Sen. John “Jay” Morris helped bring Meta’s Hyperion project to Richland Parish. Here’s what he did with his land — before and after Meta’s announcement.
“What makes it particularly egregious is not one isolated vote, but a sustained pattern: creating legal authority for a specific land deal, backing a huge tax break, lobbying a regulator, quietly positioning personal real estate around the project,” said Dane Ciolino, a professor of governmental ethics at Loyola University New Orleans, This, unfortunately, is no isolated incident. Wherever one finds a mega data center, in fact, one tends to find profiteering local politicians in its wake, along with hundreds or thousands of locals having their complaints ignored, or in the case of Utah having their complaints literally thrown out before being told they need to pay $15 each to file those complaints again.
It begs the ominous question: If this is the new normal, what will thenew normal be a year from now? Will it be the machines that ultimately hijack our consciousnesses and plug us into The Matrix, or your turncoat state senator?
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