The county's three Republican commissioners were scheduled to vote on a massive proposal: whether to approve a huge new data center. When complete, the data center will cover 40,000 acres - an area equivalent to more than 30,000 football fields. The Stratos Project is backed by Canadian multimillionaire businessman Kevin O’Leary.
A gravel road stretches through the area where the Stratos Project, a proposed data center, will be built in Box Elder County on May 15, 2026 near Snowville, Utah .
The planned construction spans about 40,000 acres and could use up to 9 gigawatts of power. A rural county at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. A multimillionaire celebrity businessman. A shadowy state agency.
What Box Elder County, Utah’s fight over a 40,000-acre data center reveals about America’s AI future. , senior scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Co-founder of Radium, a cloud computing company. Co-founder of Bay Compute, a company primarily focused on data center energy reduction.senior partners at Elevate Strategies, a political consulting firm in Utah that works to elect Democrats.
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: On May 4th, in northwestern Utah, people packed into a building at the Box Elder County fairgrounds. They were there for a special meeting of the county commission. TAMERON: It was about 1,000 people.
It was over 1,000 people. TAMERON: I heard they set up 470 chairs, and then the rest was standing room only. COMMISSION CHAIR TYLER VINCENT: So that those people here to understand and listen can hear. MEGHNA: Some 65,000 people live in Box Elder County.
It’s mostly rural, high desert land that touches the Great Salt Lake. The county seat, Brigham City, is about an hour north of Salt Lake City. That night, the county’s three Republican commissioners were scheduled to vote on a massive proposal. Whether to approve a huge new data center.
So big, it’s called a hyperscale data center. When complete, the data center will cover 40,000 acres - an area equivalent to more than 30,000 football fields. The Stratos Project is backed by Canadian multimillionaire businessman Kevin O’Leary, also known as Mr. Wonderful from the TV show Shark Tank. KEVIN O’LEARY: Utah stepped up and said,"Look, we can compete.
Not only do we have the land, 40,000 acres, we've got a pipeline running through the land, and we have this designation that can accelerate permitting.
" We're building power from scratch from the pipeline. CHAKRABARTI: O’Leary told Fox News in late April the new data center will include its own natural gas plant. He says it’s necessary to compete with China. KEVIN O’LEARY: We need AI compute power.
We're gonna start with around three gigs, which is a ton. And obviously the hyperscalers, and I would argue the government itself, the Pentagon, maybe the Department of War, this is going to be a very secure site. CHAKRABARTI: Back at the commission meeting, residents in Box Elder County said they’d been told next to nothing about the data center. VINCENT: We’ve already had public comment period.
You can continue to share your thoughts and feelings with us through the Stratos project section on the website. CHAKRABARTI: Tameron and Brenna Williams say they learned about the data center project roughly two weeks before the big commission vote. TAMERON: The county commission chair said, “we will not be accepting comments. ” And the entire meeting went downhill from there.
Order order! TAMERON: It’s that “here are all of the benefits of this project. We’re gonna get some jobs. We're gonna get some tax revenue.
” COUNTY EXPERT: “Even at the initial phases of the project. Plus, it will create jobs, boost our local economy, and strengthen our military for years to come. ” CHAKRABARTI: The protestors rejected the commissioners’ claims. Someone yelled, “How much are you being paid for this?
”TAMERON: At some point, I don't remember what happened, there was an outburst. BRENNA:"For heaven's sakes, grow up. ”CHAKRABARTI: Commissioners lost control of the meeting. They moved to a nearby room.
PROTESTORS: “People over profits! People over Profits! People over profits! ”COMMISSIONERS: “Test.
Hello, can you hear us? ”COMMISSIONERS: Resolution 2611 by Commissioner Bingham and second by commissioner perry … thank you very much. BRENNA: So that night we got on Facebook and a group of friends and kind of had a vent session. I knew I was going to, I told my husband on the way in,"I'm going to end up this, aren't I?
" So the next morning we had enough sponsors to go in and file a referendum. CHAKRABARTI: Brenna Williams wants Box Elder County residents to have a chance to vote on the Stratos hyperscale data center. With her son Tameron’s help, she’s campaigning to get a measure on the ballot that could undo the county commission’s vote. TAMERON: We're probably an 80/20 county, 80% Democratic, 20% Republican.
TAMERON: Oh, yeah, 80% Republican, 20% Democratic. Sorry. And that's just the folks who vote. This is not a community that's 80% of us show up to the polls.
It’s just not like that. And so to see people kind of organizing against this in the way they have, I mean, this has been the only thing anybody's talked about for two weeks. BRENNA: I don’t go anywhere without somebody saying where can i sign this? Or how can I help you?
Or here’s some money, take it. It’ll help you with your cause. We deserve to have a say because it’s our lives that are on the line. Our lives are going to totally change because of this.
CHAKRABARTI: And what exactly are the changes that most worry county residents? Well for one, the data center site is on the north edge of the Great Salt Lake. The iconic lake is drying up. Utah State University professor Robert Davies told the Salt Lake Tribune that the watershed there is “already in collapse.
”BRENNA: The Great Salt Lake is at 36% capacity, and we only had 19% of our snowpack this year. And they've been doing such a big push about how we have to conserve water and not to use any more than we need, and we're not supposed to be watering our lawns yet. And so now they're going to take 619 million gallons of water a year? They're just going to create that out of nowhere?
CHAKRABARTI: The site also happens to be in a valley. Davies told the Tribune that the data center would generate 16 gigawatts of thermal load – enough to raise local temperatures in Hansel Valley by five degrees during the day, and more than 20 degrees at night. BRENNA: Looking at all the other data centers, they've had increases in respiratory problems. They've had increases in heart disease and cancer.
Who wants to bring that into their community? CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. What's happening in Box Elder County right now is a microcosm of Americans' growing distrust and resistance to data centers popping up across the country.
In a poll released just this month, Gallup found that more than 70% of the people they talked to opposed the construction of a data center in their community. That's 20% more than those who oppose the idea of a nuclear power plant where they live.
A Pew Research study found that even more Americans say that data centers have a negative impact on quality of life, home prices, and the environment, but they also say that data centers have a mild positive impact on the local economy. So today, we're going to go deep into how this debate is unfolding in Box Elder County, Utah, specifically. And to help us with that, Leia Larsen joins us.
She is a water and land use reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune, and she joins us from KUER in Salt Lake City, Utah. Leia, welcome to On Point. CHAKRABARTI: First of all, thank you for all the reporting that you've been doing on this story. I know there's been a lot going on in just the past month.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, bless local journalism. I'm always going to say that. But will you help us understand literally the land that we're talking about here? What is Hansel Valley like in Box Elder County for people who've never been there?
LARSEN: It's a very unique landscape. It's very rural high desert, like you mentioned right by the Great Salt Lake. There's a lot of pronghorn like to hang out in this valley. Birds fly through.
The Great Salt Lake is on the Pacific Migratory Flyway for millions of birds that migrate from North to South America every year. So you'll see a lot of birds, see a lot of wildlife, and not a whole lot else. There's some ranches out there. There's some grazing.
But very beautiful, very rural. CHAKRABARTI: Very rural. Okay, so about the ranchers then. That seems to be one of the primary uses of the land at the moment?
LARSEN: Yes. That is pretty much the only use of the land at the moment. Okay. There's not even a lot of water out there for irrigated agriculture.
It's mostly grazing. So these 40,000 acres then, who owns it? LARSEN: Ranchers. Yeah, it's mostly ranching.
People that came out to Utah as homesteaders and stuck around and started ranching. That is mostly who owns land out there. It's not a lot of land speculators that came out and bought everything up quietly. It's still mostly ranchers.
So yeah, and I think what's interesting about this area too is that it's unzoned, which kind of bound the Box Elder County Commissioner's hands a bit in what they could and couldn't do in rejecting development out there. I think that just goes to show that a lot of local municipal codes aren't really equipped for a thing like this. CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.
Okay, so ranchers own it, but I understand that you went back and started and reacquainted yourself with local meetings, what, back in February. And at that time, was there some concern amongst those same ranchers that someone was trying to buy up the land?
It still flew underneath a lot of people's radars, but we had a water board in Box Elder County that met in February, and a rancher that was on that board was sharing his anxieties about this guy from Shark Tank was coming around and talking to some of the landowners about buying up their property to build a data center and a natural gas plant to power the data center. And he seemed really concerned, but these months later the same rancher is now on board with selling his land, and he has signed a nondisclosure agreement an, can't really talk about it much.
But they've won over a lot of people in this valley to sell their land. They've won over a lot of people in this valley to sell their land. I guess maybe the sentiment is if you can't stop it, you might as well benefit from it somehow. CHAKRABARTI: Wow.
Okay, so this guy from Shark Tank, Kevin O'Leary, so but February isn't that long ago. We go from this guy from Shark Tank sniffing around to the 40,000 acres being approved for the data center.
So Leia, when we come back, we're going to learn a little bit more about O'Leary's role in all of this, and then I want to hear from you in detail again, sort of everything that's happened between February and the May 4th vote that really got residents of Box Elder County up in arms. So we'll talk about that in just a moment. So who, exactly, is Kevin O’Leary?
His biggest claim to fame is from ABC’s reality show, Shark Tank. O’Leary’s own path to fortune began with SoftKey, a Canadian software company he cofounded in 1986. By 1999, the company, then called TLC, was purchased by toymaker giant Mattel for $4.2 billion. Mattel’s sales soon tanked, and O’Leary was fired.
A couple of Utahns prefer to describe him differently. Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan are co-founders of Elevate Strategies, a political consulting firm in Salt Lake City. They’re Democrats. And you just heard a clip from their social media channel, Elevate Utah, which aims to inform Utahns about state politics in a digestible format.
And for the past three weeks, they’ve been focusing their social media savvy on the Stratos Data Center. The state agency in charge of this project is called MIDA, the Military Installation Development Authority. The board is entirely appointed, and the governor appoints five of those members, even though he said that he thinks he only appoints one. But I don't have control over that entity.
I don't I think I appoint one person to that entity. Kevin O’Leary must have seen them, because now, he has beef with Gabi and Jackie. That’s O’Leary, last week on Fox News, accusing Elevate Utah of being operatives paid by the Chinese government. O’Leary offered no evidence to back his accusations.
He did not respond to our requests for comment. I can tell you we're definitely not Chinese operatives first of all, but it's always scary at first, right? The accusation is obviously not a small accusation. It is, you are a foreign operative that is against American national security.
And initially, it's always a little bit scary because you don't really know how people are gonna react to something like that, and you don't know who's listening and who's gonna take that seriously. It seems, however, that even though he called them Chinese spies, the multimillionaire underestimated these two Gen Z women. Especially on their physical and digital home turf. Here’s how Gabi and Jackie responded on social media.
CHAKRABARTI: Jackie and Gabi say they’re not reporters. But that hasn’t stopped them from digging. Just five days ago, they posted this discovery. So today's fresh hill is that Utah Speaker of the House Mike Schultz owns 600 acres near the Stratos Project site.
As one normally does, we were scrolling around looking at the parcels of land that are right around the proposed data center. And wouldn't you know it, we happened upon a little parcel of land with the owner name being labeled as Mike Schultz Inc. CHAKRABARTI: Local journalists followed up and discovered that the Utah House Speaker owns 25,000 acres near the Stratos Data Center site.
Schultz told Utah’s ABC4 that he bought the land before he knew anything about the data center project, and that he doesn’t stand to profit from it. I'm not out supporting this data center. I have not been out supporting this data center. From my perspective and from my ranch this hurts.
CHAKRABARTI: That contradicts previous reporting that the data center project enjoys widespread support from Utah’s top legislators. It is a combination of the environmental factors that this will have on our state, and also the fact that we have a billionaire that is coming into Utah and receiving massive tax breaks, and the process that our elected officials have pushed this through and the speed of that process.
All three of those things combined have led to massive public opposition, not only from us and our organization, but we've seen that across the political spectrum and seen that this has become not a partisan issue, but pretty much everyone in Utah has been opposed to it. And Gabi points out, if you look at the comments on any of their social media channels now you’ll see a lot like this one from animallover9144: “As a Republican, I SUPPORT WHAT THESE GIRLS ARE DOING.
We are now talking to each other again instead of yelling and I’m here for it!! ” I think this is also so telling of what happens when people that have money and people that have power, what that looks like when they run into real people that have a real concern with a real problem in their state.
Because, it's in a conservative part of a conservative state, I think that they thought that they would just be able to get this done and they would hope that, once they called us out on Fox News, people like us would back down and they would stop saying things and we would be intimidated and just say,"Okay, you do your thing.
" And I think that's been the opposite of what's happened. But I think that people in power don't often see real people getting in their way. I think it's been really exciting for our state to see that, when we do come together, we can put these other political differences aside and say, and agree on this one issue that we really can make a difference.
And even if it's not going to end the data center entirely or anything like that, it still is worth it, not only in the state, but other folks around the country that may be in similar situations can at least see what we're doing and try and find their own ways to push back against other things in their community. This is also so telling of what happens when people that have money and people that have power, what that looks like when they run into real people that have a real concern with a real problem in their state.
CHAKRABARTI: Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan are co-founders of Elevate Strategies, a political consulting firm in Salt Lake City. And by the way, I do want to note that we reached out to Box Elder County's three county commissioners for comment. None of them responded. We also contacted the board of Utah's Military Installation Development Authority.
Two members of the board declined our request for an interview, and the others did not respond. But Leia Larsen is here with us, and she's the water and land use reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. And Leia, this organization, MIDA, the Military Installation Development Authority, tell us more about it and what role it's playing in the data center. LARSEN: Yeah, I think it's a mysterious organization that flew under a lot of Utahns' radar until now.
But it was formed about two decades ago because there were rumblings that the U.S. government might shut down Hill Air Force Base, which is a big employer here in northern Utah, so it formed to keep that going. But what they've evolved into is it creates big incentives for developers, basically. One of their big projects right now is building out a luxury ski resort in Utah and an associated village and infrastructure. They've been facilitating that.
So its ties to the military are tangential at best. With this luxury ski resort, for example, I think a small percentage of the rooms at a hotel they're building will be available to veterans. But mostly what they exist for is to facilitate development in the state. CHAKRABARTI: Okay.
So, and they're the ones who provided initial approval at the state level, slightly earlier this year? LARSEN: Correct. So they're the first governing body that issued any approvals for this data center development, and that was on April 20th. And then a couple days later, they presented to the Box Elder County Commission, which is when everybody learned about this, and it became a public firestorm.
CHAKRABARTI: April 20th, but then the county commissioners took their vote on May 4th. LARSEN: Yes. I think they were going to vote on it sooner, but because there was so much backlash, they delayed the vote and rescheduled their meeting to be at the Box Elder County Fairgrounds to accommodate the hundreds of people who showed up.
CHAKRABARTI: But even just two weeks, though, is that a normal time span for the approval process for such a huge development in Utah? LARSEN: Ugh, that's a great question. Is it normal? It's not unprecedented, but yes, for something this big, you would think that there'd be a bit more of a public process.
And I will say the public process is not over. This data center's going to have to get many, many state permits and things, so there will be opportunities for the public to weigh in a little more. But yeah, I think it really took a lot of people by surprise, for sure. CHAKRABARTI: Okay.
Leia, the military connection is actually something that Kevin O'Leary the multimillionaire behind this project, has been talking about a lot, right? He's said that that the United States needs huge data centers like this for the, quote-unquote,"compute power," a lot of which may be used for the military to stay ahead of China.
Now, when you've talked to people in Box Elder County, about that, what's their response to the ways in which this data center, if it goes up, might be used? LARSEN: I think, I was just talking about this morning. There's a lot of AI fatigue, I think. I don't think people see how it really does benefit them in their daily lives.
Certainly not comparable to the cost of it in a place like this. So I think the sentiment, people are raising eyebrows. There's a lot of AI fatigue, I think. I don't think people see how it really does benefit them in their daily lives.
I think when they parrot the line that,"Oh, this is going to, the income from this data center will help benefit the military and military development.
" I think the military is famously not underfunded in this country, so I think people are a little curious about that. What benefit is this actually providing to the state and to the residents that are going to live near this thing? CHAKRABARTI: Let's listen to actually a member of MIDA. That's the Military Installation Development Authority.
And again, they didn't respond fully to our request for comment. But after that May 4th County Commission vote, Paul Morris, executive director of MIDA, explained why it's even involved with the Stratos Data Center project. MIDA was approached by the assistant undersecretary for the Air Force.
He came to Utah and said that all of the military, Army, Air Force, everyone, there's an executive order from President Trump that said that we have to have some hyperscale data centers and power resiliency. And he asked us specifically,"Can you work with somebody to find it in Utah to start?
"Because it's a national security imperative. CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that's Paul Morris, executive director of Utah's Military Installation Development Authority. That's potentially what the Stratos Project, if it goes up and is fully completed, could be used for. But Leia, we keep talking about the potential costs, and I know this is where you've done your deepest reporting.
So let's dive into that. When the project, if it gets fully built out across those 40,000 acres, which is what? The size of Washington D.C. , twice Manhattan.
That's what I've been reading. How much power would it use? So all that we have to go on are limited public statements. But we've heard at full build it could be 7.5 to nine gigawatts.
And to put that into context, the current electrical energy consumption of the entire state of Utah is about four gigawatts, so it would more than double, likely, our energy generation in this state. CHAKRABARTI: So it could potentially use almost twice as much energy as the entire state uses right now? CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And where would that power come from?
LARSEN: So there is a natural gas pipeline that runs through this valley, and this is reportedly why Kevin O'Leary liked this site, because this Ruby Pipeline that carries natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada and Oregon and California, it runs right through it. There is a natural gas pipeline that runs through this valley, and this is reportedly why Kevin O'Leary liked this site.
So the messaging that we've heard is that it will be powered by its own natural gas plant that will generate all the electricity. However, we're also getting some contradictory messaging, which I think is also frustrating the public.
Because we have one state official from MIDA saying this will be 100% natural gas powered, and then you hear messaging from O'Leary and the governor that like, no, maybe it will incorporate some renewables so there'll be less of an impact.
"CHAKRABARTI: But then the fact about data centers, which alarms a lot of people in where they're going up in their communities, is water, right? And of course, Utah is having a major water problem right now. We mentioned the Great Salt Lake earlier. LARSEN: So their public statements have been that they are going to get 3,000-acre feet from Hansville Valley, from some of these ranchers, and then another 10,000 acre feet from surrounding area.
So to put that in context, that's about enough water to meet the basic needs of 20,000 Utah households, which is a lot. CHAKRABARTI: But is that water even there? Because you said earlier that there isn't enough water in the area for even irrigation for much more than ranching. LARSEN: Yes.
Within Hansel Valley itself the groundwater, too, is pretty brackish because it's so close to the Great Salt Lake, so the groundwater itself is salty. So they will probably need to build some kind of treatment plant to remove those salts to make the water usable, which takes even more energy. But yes, this area's not well known for having a ton of water to spare. We are pretty water-strapped in general within the Great Salt Lake basin.
CHAKRABARTI: Again, I honestly, I wish that MIDA and Kevin O'Leary's company had responded to us, because I would love to ask them, there's land there, but since water is so key to keeping the data centers cool and Utah's already in a drought, I'm just not sure why they think this is a feasible property. LARSEN: We have some state officials that are cheerleading it, and we'll share some of the talking points.
But they'll say,"Oh it's going to use closed-loop cooling systems, so the water demands will be less.
" Closed loop is pretty vague. It's doesn't describe a specific technology, so we need to see that technology. And they'll say things like,"Oh, they're not gonna pull water from the Great Salt Lake, so that won't be impacted.
" But of course they're not gonna pull water from the Great Salt Lake. In this part of the Great Salt Lake specifically, it's 30% salt, and by comparison, the ocean is about 3% salt. So it's way too salty to use, so of course they're not gonna stick a straw into the lake and siphon it away. But what they will take is water that would otherwise flow to the lake, right?
But yeah, O'Leary has said publicly that we're not gonna harm the Great Salt Lake or environmental impact will be low. LARSEN: Not yet. We don't, again, we don't know the technology that they're gonna use. And a lot of the water talk is about the data center itself and how it's gonna be cooled, but don't forget there's gonna be a massive natural gas plant.
And what's that going to use? Traditional national gas plants use steam, and that requires a lot of water. So we don't know yet. CHAKRABARTI: As I mentioned before, and I wanna remind our listeners, we at On Point did reach out to all the commissioners, the county commissioners in Box Elder County.
They did not respond, but they did speak after that May 4th commission vote, and here's County Commissioner Lee Perry. And he said that part of the issue with the data center project is, as you mentioned earlier, Leia, that the land is unzoned, which he why he says the commissioners tried to get certain guarantees from the Stratos Project developer.
LEE PERRY: Because it's unzoned, they could have done a lot of things a lot worse than what I get by going with the guarantees. As a commission, we have been trying for two years to get our county and people in this county to zone their property so that we can have more control going forward to make sure that the citizens have a better chance to talk with our planning and zoning commission as these types of things occur.
CHAKRABARTI: And Perry also said that he was asked whether he felt responsible for a decision that could have an impact on water and air quality, and here's his response. PERRY: Our vote today had nothing to do with water or air quality. Those are not issues that the county has any control over. Those water rights are owned by individuals.
I don't have any control. I can't be the king and tell them they can't use their water for what they want to use it for. I think it's actually your reporting that raised the issue of the potential impact on just even the temperatures in Hansel Valley there. Tell me more about that.
LARSEN: Yeah. All those computer servers put out a lot of heat as they're computing, so that's one source of thermal load. The gas plant itself will produce a lot of heat. So I talked to this physicist here in Utah who calculated the total thermal load of this, and he said it would be the heat equivalent of releasing 23 atom bombs every day.
This physicist here in Utah who calculated the total thermal load of this ... said it would be the heat equivalent of releasing 23 atom bombs every day. And that's not that they're gonna create a nuclear winter or anything, or all this radiation, but the heat load is kind of this is the best way he could find to help people visualize.
And I think you mentioned at the top, this would raise daytime temperatures up to five degrees and nighttime temperatures up to 28 degrees, and even a little bit of heat can increase evaporation a lot, which is not great with this valley's location and its proximity to the Great Salt Lake, which is really struggling. And then also, those nighttime temperatures being so high, it could eliminate the dew point, so all the critters that come out at night to be active and replenish themselves, if there's no dew point, that could just totally wipe out the area's ecology.
It has a lot of people understandably very concerned. Like, I can't even wrap my head around that. But ... Utah is such a fascinating and important state.
Because we also have what you heard in those clips from Perry, who's actually in control of water rights? Is it the ranchers? Can they buy and sell it? Who's in control of how that land is zoned?
Can you just walk us a little bit through how that's kind of handled in Utah and if there's any sort of peculiarities around the proposed site for the data center project? LARSEN: Yeah. So the water of Utah is owned by the people of Utah, and then people who want to use the water apply for the right to use the water with the state. So that's called a water right.
And yes, what the data center developers are looking to do is buy up water rights from the ranchers in the area that already have these rights. But I guess one of the odd things that you kind of touched on is that the Great Salt Lake, it's shrinking. It's lost more than half its volume.
We have hundreds of square miles of lakebed baking in the sun every day, turning into a dust source that's causing more air pollution on the Wasatch Front. So our water use in the state is not sustainable. The reason the Great Salt Lake is shrinking is not because of climate change. It's because of unsustainable water use upstream.
So we've been hearing this messaging constantly from our state leadership that we need to conserve, we need to conserve, we gotta save the Great Salt Lake. It's probably gonna hit another record low this year because we just had our worst winter on record, and we really depend on snow in this state to fill our reservoirs and then the Great Salt Lake. That is the state of water right now in Utah.
It's very scarce and understandably has a lot of people worried. CHAKRABARTI: Wow, okay. And the fact that all of this is going forward, at least for now, on such a high-speed timeline, and we haven't yet had the kind of reviews that one would expect for a project like this, that's one of the things that I think reflects across the country in this growing distrust and pushback against data centers well outside of Utah.
So we want to just step back here for a moment and also ask, what is it like living right by a data center? And for an answer to that, we actually went to Virginia. Greg Pirio lives in Sterling, Virginia. It's a suburb of Washington, D.C.
, and it's in Loudoun County, which is now often referred to as Data Center Alley. Because there are some 200 data centers in just that one county, one of the largest concentrations in the world. GREG PIRIO: I live 150 yards from the Vantage VA2 Data Center, and it runs 24/7 with eight gas turbine generators that make horrendous noise all the time.
There are 50 backup diesel generators, and when that goes off, it even gets louder, and you can see the black smoke from it. There's two types of noise. One is a lower rumble, and then there's a higher pitched frequency that comes. I drive home, and I get out of my car.
It's like you feel like you're cursed because you hear all this noise. I drive home, and I get out of my car. It's like you feel like you're cursed because you hear all this noise. And then you go inside your home.
We get some relief, but it actually comes in through the windows, the sound. During the night, I'll wake up, and I hear the sound, and it's hard to get back to sleep, and I do get a headache from it. Our neighbors aren't out on the streets talking to each other anymore because of all the noise. Some people who barbecue and all of that, they've stopped barbecuing.
They don't sit out onto their decks anymore. People have looked into soundproofing their windows, and it costs about $1,000 a window. It's just awful, and we haven't gotten a solution yet from it, and we're trying to work with our county supervisors and others to get some relief, but it hasn't happened. One of the things I liked about it when I moved here was all the forest and the quietness of it.
Yeah, it was very nice. It's just changed completely because of this data center. I would think about moving away, but who would buy my place? I live in a townhouse.
Two doors down, there is a townhouse that's been on the market for nine months and nobody's bought it. CHAKRABARTI: Greg Pirio in Sterling, Virginia. I'd like to bring Vijay Gadepally into the conversation now. He's with us from Saratoga, California.
He's a senior scientist at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and co-founder of Radium, a cloud computing company, and also co-founder of Bay Compute, a company primarily focused on data center energy reduction. VIJAY GADEPALLY: Meghna, a pleasure to be back on the show, and thank you for hosting this conversation. CHAKRABARTI: It's every day now that we're hearing of yet another community that's really upset about a data center being proposed in their backyards.
And I think Box Elder County is so instructive because it's the speed, which is one of the major issues. So explain to us why nationally right now there is this high-speed mushrooming of data centers so quickly and in so many places. What is the need? GADEPALLY: Yeah, so it's a complicated answer as always, but it's partly for more AI usage.
But the bigger issue really is about the power density and the speed of growth right now. So as we know, data centers have been around for decades and have always been a relatively large demand on the grid.
However, AI is changing this data center problem in a few ways. First is just more usage. There's more companies that are running AI models, training AI models. The next is the density.
AI servers with GPUs are, can be, 5 to 10 times more dense per unit of volume than your traditional cloud servers. And the second is speed. The demand is growing much faster than the grid, the transmission, and all of the power generation can be built. And so yes, it is true there are a lot of data center projects that are coming up across the country.
CHAKRABARTI: And why are they being built domestically? Why can't these data centers be built elsewhere? Is it just simply a national security issue? GADEPALLY: So there's a few reasons why it's still advantageous to build AI data centers in the U.S. Some of these come down to national security, as you mentioned.
Another is on data sovereignty, so there is a lot of data that we're processing that we may not want to cross other borders. Another is in this world, geopolitical risk is a fairly large factor. And then of course, the very real technical challenges of having, low latency, high reliability.
And then further is also, I think on the more strategic angle, is about whether we're anchoring data center development, and whether that's helping anchor U.S. energy investments and upgrades into our energy infrastructure across the nation. GADEPALLY: So there's definitely some updates that are happening to the grid because of data centers.
And so while most data centers today are still grid connected, we're seeing that a large percentage of new data center builds that are coming out are using some sort of on-site generation for primary power. And that number is slated to increase in a fairly significant way just in the next five years or so. GADEPALLY: So a lot of states are coming up with ways for data center projects to actually participate in improving the grid.
A lot of states are coming up with ways for data center projects to actually participate in improving the grid. And the challenge I think that a lot of folks are facing right now is that grid interconnectivity or being able to connect your data center to the grid can often take quite a few years, three to seven years.
However, the data center builds are often looking at one and a half years to two years in terms of, from groundbreaking to wanting to bring tenants in. So there is a silver lining because there's an opportunity here for data centers to actually be quite advantageous. One of the areas that we study is often, how quickly can loads be turned on or in many cases turned off.
And data centers are very different than more traditional industrial loads because their demand is software controlled, which means that if we're seeing stresses in the grid, a data center can maybe pause non-urgent AI tasks, maybe move workloads from one region to another, use some of the onsite or backup generation that they might have, or even just change the way they operate very quickly in the order of minutes. And if you think of this at a larger scale, this can actually shift hundreds of megawatts in an order of minutes, and that can make it not just a burden on the grid, but potentially a flexible resource to help stabilize aspects of the grids.
But I should caveat that needs to be designed, and that is something that we're working on but is not necessarily nationally the standard yet. CHAKRABARTI: I have to say, your explanation is helping me make some sense of this overall situation across the country, but simultaneously what doesn't make sense is with this obvious spike in the demand for power because of data centers, the Trump administration is simultaneously just killing wind projects everywhere it can across the country.
And I'm thinking, putting myself back in the shoes of residents in Box Elder County, Utah, the other thing that doesn't make sense is some of these data centers are being sited in places that would seem to be very ill-fitting for the overall needs of them. Vijay, can you make that make sense somehow? GADEPALLY: Yeah, so and I think there's some important reports that have come in on this topic, right?
So we have, depending on which database you're looking at, currently about 3,000 to 4,000 operational data centers in the country, and again, depending on which source you're looking at, you're looking at somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 data centers that are in some stage of development at this point. Now, one really interesting aspect of this is that there has been a shift. Currently about 80% or more of existing data centers are urban.
However, a vast majority, two-thirds roughly, of new data centers that are being planned are coming in rural areas. So we're seeing a real shift on where data centers are coming up. And one thing I like to think about is not all data center projects are the same, and it's not a blanket good or bad if we look at these.
And so there are opportunities for them to help bring in grid investment, tax revenue, clean power that can often come in with some of these data center builds and some local benefits. And so I like to bucket these sometimes as good projects. These are folks that are being transparent about the power, water, maybe emissions and grid impacts. They're paying their fair share for upgrades, and the community is a part of this process.
And then you have some of the more problematic ones, which are kind of just pushing things through, straining local power water systems, and shifting a lot of costs to taxpayers. And so I think there is a part of this that we need to have this conversation about. And I will note that there are just some strategic projects in order to maintain national AI competitiveness that might fall into a slightly different bucket.
CHAKRABARTI: Vijay Gadepally, senior scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, thank you so much for joining us today. CHAKRABARTI: Leia, I want to close the show again with you. Listening to Vijay's explanation there, I hear that some data centers are good, some data centers are doing it the right way, others are not. It seems to me that Utahns are definitely feeling like they're in the latter category.
What are the next things that residents are hoping might happen, or the next steps in just the overall development of the Box Elder County data center project? LARSEN: It's still going to have to apply for some permits, some environmental permits for air quality, for water quality. It does plan to discharge at least some water into the Great Salt Lake, so they'll have to regulate that.
But I think one thing that's interesting to me about this is there are two data centers of similar size being built in another part of the state that's also rural, in the central part of the state. And while there is some local opposition to that, it's not nearly as huge as what the outcry we're hearing here.
So I think maybe it's the proximity to the lake the fact that the state feels like, it seems like it's cheerleading the project and picking winners and losers is what has people upset here. The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
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