I really think advocating against building data centers in Box Elder County Utah kind of gives away the whole game here. The impact logic is so clearly motivated.

Have you ever been there? Or even near there? Like, driven from San Francisco to the East Coast at one point? It's a literal wasteland. It is like being on the moon.

I knew someone would come out and say that. To answer your question, I have driven through, multiple times. I suggest starting with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire to raise your awareness.

I've been there. If you could pick any place in the world to site a data center, Box Elder County would be high on the list.

Edward Abby wrote about southern Utah. Red rock country. Box Elder County is northern Utah. Night and day.

You missed the point. Ecosystems are not wastelands. Abbey’s descriptions of his Utah are compelling, but he’s still in places the uninformed would call dusty wastelands.

That is an argument against building data centers --- or anything else --- anywhere in the world.

What ecosystem is it endangering? Is using the land a problem? Utah has 10.5 million acres of farmland that I would think has some impact on the ecosystem too, should we stop doing that too?

Heat. 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat. In an already arid environment. What's the worst that can happen?

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

You're right, we should build it in a third world country instead!

I'd argue we don't need to build a 9 GW data center anywhere. But that's just me.

This new flavor of NIMBY is pretty funny.

There is very little we do that is "needed" if you break it down to actual necessities (basic needs pyramid).

Why do you presume yourself to be part of the "we" in question? This seems like it's a case of other people using their own resources to do things that don't involve you; what's your stake in it?

And given your correct acknowledgement that it's "just you" expressing subjective normative opinions about things you're not involved in, what valid basis do you have for assessing what anyone who is involved actually needs?

> 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat.

For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.

I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).

To generate that 9 GW of electrical energy typically about twice that amount in heat will be generated at the thermal engines converting the fuel chemical energy to electicity. Has anyone studied this 18 GW heat load at the site of electricity generation?

The total head load for consuming electrical energy of 9 GW is thus approximately 3*9 GW = 27 GW = 9 GW at the GPU's and 18 GW at the electricity generation plant.

They mention a gas plant would have to be about 7.5 x 40 acres = 300 acres.

By your calculation its 1 GW / 1000 acres of natural incident solar power; so natural solar power on 300 acres would be just 0.3 GW on the would-be plant.

Instead its dissipating 18 GW (!) 60 x higher!

That is ignoring the 9 GW on the GPU site.

Poor nations desiring developed nation level energy per capita consumption combined with developed nation exploding energy consumption for the AI rat race means humanity ogles consuming energy at such power levels that mere prompt heating approaches similar power levels and densities as GHG radiation forcing did!

In other words, even if we succeeded in phasing out all fossil fuel energy use and replace them with renewables, and even if we somehow extracted all the excess CO2 back out, we will relatively quickly replace the cause of global warming from GHG emissions to prompt heating for generating and dissipating our electric energy use.

2 Exceptions: wind energy and hopefully someday exploiting the temperature difference at ground level versus the tropopause.

Humans have made aerostats (balloons with a tether), humans have made aerostats that went much higher than the tropopause, although only in acceptable weather.

At the tropopause the temperature is about 60 degrees C colder (up to about 100 degrees C in tropical regions).

Imagine a heat loop or huge inflatable levitating heat pipe (using phase transition). The new access at ground level to a cold bath in addition to the environmental warm bath can be used to drive a thermal engine and generate electricity (day and night, winter and summer). It behaves more like baseload energy, and it helps cool the planet: the heat transported from surface level if released at the tropopause level is above about ~70% of the CO2 of the atmosphere, so there it can more quickly escape to the CMB's low temperature bath.

We could be cooling the planet while generating useful electrical energy. The first prototypes should avoid any inhabited areas by a distance at least equal to the structure height (so it doesn't cause damage to population residences). Most humans live "close" to a coast line, so place the first such structures about 15 km into the sea. Another advantage is that the sea water has a high heat capacity, is pumpable, and can provide as a very stable reference thermal hot side bath. I.e. the system shouldn't stall because it has depleted local heat in the environment, you can always pump lukewarm seawater into the device, which can also be used to freeze seawater (desalinating it, see freeze desalination). The frozen seawater can be brought to conventional energy plants to lower their cold side bath temperatures, increasing the efficiency of solar but also gas / fuel / nuclear energy plants.

None of this contradicts the laws of thermodynamics, its an engineering problem: how do we build an inflatable structure that withstands the wind shear forces, dampens structure resonances, identifying the ideal carrier for transporting the heat (a pure substance? a mixture?, ...), a group of specialists should comb through the space of options to get a rough first overview of which directions would be more or less promising than alternatives.

A major flyway for millions of migratory birds.

It seems fairly likely that a comically gargantuan data center like Stratos would endanger the surrounding ecosystem, at a minimum.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

But I also think there's very little chance that they even get 1 GW up and running anytime soon, and less than 3 GW before the whole thing gets scrapped (just like plenty of the other hyperscale data center projects that keep getting shouted about).

No one needs that much AI, even if they did need that much AI there are more efficient and cheaper ways to make it happen, and even if there weren't these boxes will be obsolete within 3-4 years.

The whole thing is baffling.

If I were cynical I'd wonder if they're actually trying to cook the planet.

Or maybe there's some kind of tax grift involved.

Makes no sense at all otherwise.

Yea, I wonder the same. Something I've been wanting to read up on is how the land ownership works with these data center deals.

Because developers promising massive projects to scoop up a bunch of land, do little to nothing with it, sit on it for awhile, and then eventually just sell it for a profit...that's not a new thing at all and isn't unique to the tech industry.

I wouldn't be surprised if a not-so-insignificant part of all of this winds up being just banking land that you got zoning, entitlements, and maybe some utility infra stuff setup for.

That may also explain some of the kind of puzzling cloak and dagger behavior with so many of these data center initiatives in local communities. If you truly think you're about to build something that is going to "imminently transform the way we do everything" and become some kind of $X trillion dollar industry, I'd imagine you'd be showing up with better "gifts" to ensure quick frictionless approval. But if they're more so viewing project proposals as speculative investments for control of land that is hopefully desirable to a bunch of tech firms (whether that's now or years from now), then keeping costs low and details vague early on makes more sense.

It's absolutely likely that this Stratos project is a way to lock up land for future development. From Ogden to Provo there are really only two places to expand. West along I-80 a bit into the Oquirrh Mountains, but that runs into the salt flats and DoD land, or NW along I-84 into - you guessed it - Box Elder county. And for those calling it a wasteland, it’s easy to justify turning it into suburbs much like the suburbs of LA. Provided you can get water rights. Proposing an AI hyperscale data center to scoop up money and water for the entire area is the perfect scheme for a pivot to development.

What does "absolutely likely" mean?