00:00A massive outcry in Box Elder County, Utah.
00:03I will tell you, you continue.
00:06I have law enforcement here who will remove you from the meeting.
00:09After a three-person county commission unanimously approved construction of a massive hyperscale data center.
00:19That opponents worry could lead to devastating impacts.
00:23Why are you protecting?
00:24Protect us!
00:26What happened in Box Elder County and its newly approved 40,000-acre data center?
00:31And what does it point to for the rest of the country?
00:33Here's what you need to know.
00:35Hundreds of angry Utah residents turned out in force to a fiery Box Elder County commission meeting on May 4th.
00:41Where they fiercely opposed a construction proposal to build a massive 40,000-acre data center.
00:46Which is about 62 square miles, or roughly two and a half times the size of Manhattan.
00:51The controversial data center, which is expected to generate and use double the amount of energy as the entire state
00:57of Utah,
00:58was introduced by businessman and Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful.
01:04The data center is set to occupy three separate areas of undeveloped land in the county's Hansel Valley,
01:09which is located 20 miles south of the Idaho border.
01:13They will primarily be used for artificial intelligence operations associated with the energy, computing power,
01:19and data storage needs for, quote, defense operations.
01:22Utah News Dispatch reported the project, which is being dubbed Stratos by the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA,
01:29needed county approval because it was slated to be built on private, unzoned land.
01:33It is projected that the Stratos project would take a decade to construct, and that it would reportedly create 2
01:39,000 permanent jobs.
01:40According to ABC4, project officials also claimed the center would be self-sufficient,
01:45and would use a closed-loop system to reuse water that would dispense back into Utah's Great Salt Lake.
01:51A natural gas plant would also be constructed on site to generate the whopping 9 gigawatts of electricity that would
01:58be required to sustain the center.
01:59But the promises from MIDA and Mr. Wonderful's team have seemingly fallen on deaf ears,
02:04as hundreds of protesters showed up to the meeting to oppose the data center, citing environmental and water usage concerns.
02:11The crowd became so rowdy at one point that county officials left the stage to continue the meeting in a
02:16separate room that was livestreamed to residents.
02:19One Utah State professor sympathetic to the frustrations of the protesters told Fox 13 that projects like Stratos go in
02:26and, quote,
02:27scraped the living systems off the surface of the earth, on top of doubling the state's energy usage.
02:32They're proposing a 9 gigawatt, that's 9 billion watt facility.
02:37That's about two and a half New York City's worth of electrical consumption combined.
02:44But during an earlier Box Elder County Commission meeting in April,
02:47MIDA's executive director and general counsel Paul Morris argued that data centers of the past had tarnished the reputation of
02:54future builds,
02:55which now have improved water usage and energy efficiency systems.
02:59Data centers of the old have a bad reputation.
03:02They gobble up a lot of water.
03:05They use up your power.
03:07And then when they're all built, they don't employ many people.
03:11The power usage is completely self-contained.
03:16A hundred percent of the power will be generated off the Ruby pipeline.
03:19It will not take one electron from the from the grid.
03:23The water usage is minimal.
03:25The water that they're buying is part of getting the land for both the cooling.
03:29It's not the evaporative cooling of old days.
03:32It's circulated water that's reused.
03:35According to Utah News Dispatch, the Stratos project was approved by the commissioners before an environmental impact study was completed.
03:42Casey Hill, the spokesperson for O'Leary Digital, even told the press after the controversial vote that he was unsure
03:49when an impact study would be completed.
03:51Mr. Wonderful himself later addressed the public outcry, publishing a video about the Utah proposal and voicing his support for
03:58sustainability.
03:58Well, I'm actually the only developer of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies.
04:06So I'm pretty aware of what these concerns are.
04:09They are around air, water use, heat, noise, pollution.
04:16So sustainability is at the heart of what we do in terms of all these proposals.
04:21But residents in the area haven't been convinced, vilifying the project to local news stations.
04:25We care about the environment and everything is already so messed up that putting this here is just going to
04:31do more damage to what little water we have here.
04:34We're just not a wasteland as they think we are.
04:39We have value.
04:42The Great Salt Lake has value.
04:45This was our one opportunity to hopefully get our voices heard and we were kind of shut down.
04:50It's a really, really bad deal.
04:51We don't get anything for it other than we're losing land, we're losing water, and we're losing air quality.
04:56Utah isn't alone.
04:57Axios reports that in 2025 alone, nearly 3,000 data centers were slated for construction.
05:03According to Pew Research, 38% of Americans live within five miles of at least one center.
05:08Now, a wave of citizens across the country are embracing a not-in-my-backyard stance when it comes to
05:14the construction projects.
05:15A data center proposal in East Whiteland Township, Pennsylvania received massive pushback from residents after the developer wanted to expand
05:22the approved center's footprint to more than 1.6 million square feet.
05:27Residents were so fed up with the amended plan that the township's planning commission had to reschedule the meeting to
05:32accommodate the crowd.
05:33Everything that I'm hearing tonight and everything I've researched about data centers, it concerns me.
05:40Even if you ask AI, are data centers good? The overwhelming answer is no.
05:50A massive 250-acre Stargate data center proposal in Saline Township, Michigan, also raised the ire of local residents.
05:57Even the local planning commission and township board voted to deny the developer's request to rezone the proposed area, according
06:05to Fortune magazine.
06:06But after a lawsuit and threats that the project could move forward through zoning loopholes, the data center won out.
06:12According to Business Insider, the One Gigawatt Center will power Oracle's AI, and the developer has already secured $16 billion
06:19in funding.
06:20Several reports suggest the operational data centers are already wreaking havoc on nearby residents.
06:25Neighbors in Loudoun County, Virginia, told Politico that a gas-powered data center was bombarding their homes with an unrelenting,
06:32high-pitched whine.
06:33In Arizona, researchers even found that data centers were warming nearby neighborhoods in the Phoenix area, with one reading that
06:40showed a 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit increase.
06:43And the long-term effects of living and breathing nearby data centers is still untested.
06:47According to one peer-reviewed study from January 2026, which analyzed Virginia's data center alley, which contains the largest concentration
06:56of data centers in the world, these centers pose significant health and environmental risks to the areas surrounding them.
07:02Data centers are actually not a new invention.
07:05According to IBM, the first center dates back to the 1940s, when the U.S. military built the Electrical Numerical
07:11Integrator and Computer, which required a room to store massive machines.
07:15The internet boom in the 90s and 2000s also brought with it a need for cloud computing processing centers.
07:21According to Tyson Slocum, the director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, these early data centers were relatively nondescript and went
07:29generally unnoticed by the public and didn't bring about a lot of opposition.
07:33But with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, the public's view on data centers has started to shift.
07:38AI data centers are a whole other animal, right, because they are so much more power hungry.
07:44And because some of the proposals are much larger in size in terms of the square foot footprint, all of
07:53a sudden now everybody knows about them.
07:55And what you're seeing now is there is huge market interest in AI because all of the AI developers have
08:05correctly noted that AI could be the single greatest human invention, that it could transform every single industry.
08:15And so Wall Street and retail stock investors are like, well, I need to invest in AI companies because this
08:24AI company will literally replace all of the other portfolio of investments that I have.
08:31And data centers have become sort of the public facing marker of how successful an AI company is in developing
08:43AI.
08:44And as AI companies and the Trump administration have embraced the hyperscale data center model, public opposition, particularly in rural
08:51areas where proposed data centers will live, appears to be on the rise.
08:55A January 2026 report from MacroEdge shows there's been significant pushback against these AI centers, which has led many projects
09:02to be postponed or canceled outright.
09:04According to a review of local news reports and public records, the climate website Heatmap reports that 25 data centers'
09:11proposals were canceled in 2025.
09:13A whopping four times as many as the prior year.
09:16And according to Slocum, the opposition doesn't fall on party lines.
09:20The backlash we're seeing, I think, by the American people in Republican areas, in Democratic areas, it doesn't matter.
09:27The backlash is actually, I think, a coherent, rational response to this sort of my way or the highway approach
09:37that has dominated big tech data center development.
09:41I don't think we need to build all the data centers that big tech tells us they need.
09:46I don't think we need AI applications for everything that tech companies tell us that they need.
09:53I think AI can be an incredible, incredible technological supplement.
09:59But too often, big tech companies talk about AI not as a supplement, but as a replacement, as a replacement
10:06for human labor, as a replacement for human thinking, as a replacement for human creativity, as a replacement for interpersonal
10:14relationships.
10:15And again, the American people have provided no consent to that sort of draconian vision.
10:21One Pew research study found that a vast majority of polled Americans say data centers cause more harm than good
10:26when it comes to the environment, energy costs and quality of life.
10:30The data center operation has impacts far beyond the fence line of the physical data center.
10:36It's got an impact on potentially the water usage and water quality of the community.
10:42It can affect the electric bills of folks because the data center is drawing on energy resources from 10 miles
10:50or 100 miles away.
10:52And then locally, there are a lot of environmental and quality of life issues that are affected by these facilities.
10:58This is not just a benign warehouse.
11:01Transparency with the public has also been an issue with data center construction.
11:05According to a report from NBC News, big tech companies are having local officials sign nondisclosure agreements, which has shrouded
11:12projects in secrecy.
11:13Jonathan Gilmore and Rebecca Kilberg, public policy experts from the Aspen Policy Academy Science and Technology Fellowship, hit several walls
11:21in 2024 when they embarked on a project to pull data center water use and analyze it and offer policy
11:27suggestions.
11:28What we found was that most of this data was not available publicly and that we had to submit the
11:33Utah equivalent of Freedom of Information Act requests.
11:37I mean, part of this experience was the shock of how difficult the investigation was, of how difficult it was
11:43to get the data from the municipalities and some of that was legal restrictions around what we were allowed to
11:49access.
11:49But also some of that just seemed to be a lack of response and potentially a lack of data there.
11:54A lot of the negotiations have happened under NDA.
11:57One of the through lines is that the public is getting more and more concerned about this and more and
12:02more engaged in this issue.
12:03And so now we're seeing stories, it seems like every week of big community meetings where residents are demanding more
12:11transparency and accountability from their community boards or planning boards and are demanding data about how the data centers will
12:22impact their communities.
12:24Although data centers are touted as imperative to build out America's prowess in artificial intelligence, there are still real questions
12:30about the future of AI and if data centers will even need to be a part of the picture at
12:35all.
12:35Technology has a super fast depreciation rate.
12:39What that means in plain English is the usefulness of microprocessors, whether it's in our laptop or in our smartphones
12:48or in a data center, really decreases its efficiency value over time.
12:54And what that means is a data center that is built in 2026 may not be around by 2029 or
13:032030.
13:03Data centers are not going to be immune to the radical and severe technological depreciation that has defined big tech
13:13over the last generation or so.
13:15And so I do have a concern that we might be in a very short term sort of cycle where
13:22right now in 2026 people are like, we need to see all of this data center capacity, but in the
13:30next two or three years we may not need that capacity.
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