The Data Center That Releases 23 Atom Bombs of Heat a Day

On May 4, three Box Elder County commissioners voted unanimously to authorize a 40,000-acre, 9-gigawatt artificial-intelligence data-center campus on the high desert south of US-84. According to reporting from the meeting, the commissioners cast that vote from a back room and broadcast it onto a screen in the chamber where the public was waiting. Hundreds of residents had shown up to object. The vote took the time it takes to read three resolutions aloud.

Two days later, residents began filing referendum petitions to undo it. Within a week, a group calling itself Box Elder Accountability Referendum had filed two formal applications with the county, more than 3,800 Utahns had paid the $15 fee to lodge formal protests with the Utah State Engineer over the project’s water claim, and a separate petition signed by over 6,000 people had been carried up the steps of the State Capitol and delivered to Governor Spencer Cox.

This is the position of this newspaper: Project Stratos may end up being good for Utah, bad for Utah, or — most likely — somewhere in between. We do not know yet. What we already know, and what we want to register before another shovel turns, is that a project of this size was not supposed to be approved this way. The vote happened. The democratic question did not.

What’s actually being built

Project Stratos is being developed by O’Leary Digital Limited — the infrastructure vehicle of Kevin O’Leary, the venture investor best known to the public from “Shark Tank” — through a joint venture with a firm called West GenCo. The official project documents describe a phased buildout on approximately 40,000 acres of unincorporated, mostly state-owned land in Hansel Valley in the northwest corner of the state, an area larger than the city of San Francisco.

At full buildout the campus is designed to draw nine gigawatts of electricity. That is more power than the entire State of Utah currently consumes on an average day. Because the local grid cannot supply it, the project will build its own natural-gas-fired power plant on site, fed from the Ruby Pipeline through an agreement with Tallgrass Energy. The Utah Governor’s Office FAQ on the project lists the campus’s intended workloads as AI training and inference, cloud computing, and “mission-critical national defense operations.”

The total invested capital figure most widely reported — including by Fortune and by O’Leary himself in interviews — is on the order of $100 billion across all phases. That number is not the developer’s out-of-pocket cost. It is a stack: O’Leary Digital pays for site development; separate entities will finance the buildings, the on-site power plant, and the IT equipment inside, with debt financing assembled against the project as a whole. Independent industry estimates put the cost of building one gigawatt of AI capacity at $35 billion to $60 billion, so $100 billion across nine gigawatts is, if anything, conservative.

How it got approved

The most important fact about the May 4 vote is the one nobody campaigned on: the Box Elder commissioners were not really the deciding body. The decision had already been made one level up, by an agency most Utahns have never heard of.

The Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, was created by the Utah Legislature in 2007 to support military bases. In the years since, its remit has been quietly broadened to cover “energy and technology investment” of strategic interest, and its governance structure — a board appointed by the governor and federal officeholders — gives it the powers of a local government inside the boundaries of any “project area” it designates. MIDA can levy special taxes, issue bonds, hand out property-tax rebates that run for decades, and, crucially, pre-empt local zoning and land-use authority. On April 24, MIDA’s board approved the Stratos project area. The May 4 county vote was a state-law formality required to let MIDA proceed.

Commissioner Lee Perry of Box Elder said as much to KUER afterward: the commissioners felt their hands were tied. We take him at his word. That is the problem. A state agency with no directly elected members designated 40,000 acres of land for a use the surrounding county had not been asked to consent to, in a process where the only elected officials in the chain — the three county commissioners — told the public, accurately, that they could not say no. The $49 million a year in projected property-tax revenue, the headline jobs figures, the new state corridor of “energy and technology investment” — every benefit cited is real. So is the fact that nobody who lives in Box Elder County voted for any of it.

The heat

This is where the framing that has dominated coverage — “23 atom bombs of heat per day” — comes in. Robert Davies, a physicist at Utah State University, ran the numbers in early May and concluded that the campus and its co-located gas plant together would dump thermal energy equivalent to roughly 23 Hiroshima-scale atomic bombs into Hansel Valley every twenty-four hours. He arrived at the figure by adding the data center’s projected nine gigawatts of electrical demand to the seven-to-eight gigawatts of waste heat it will radiate as servers convert electricity into computation, and then comparing the daily total — roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal load, or about 1.4 × 10¹⁵ joules per day — to the ~63 terajoules released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The math, done independently, supports the comparison. Sixteen gigawatts of continuous thermal load is, in raw energy terms, twenty-two to twenty-three Hiroshimas a day, every day, in perpetuity. Davies and BYU ecologist Ben Abbott have been careful to note the obvious difference: a bomb releases its energy in a microsecond, while a data center releases it across 86,400 seconds. Nobody is suggesting the campus will explode. The point of the comparison is the scale of the energy that has to go somewhere. Davies’ preliminary modeling, reviewed by Abbott, projects that “somewhere” will be Hansel Valley’s air column, with local daytime temperatures rising by roughly five degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures by as much as twenty-eight degrees. Hansel Valley is a topographic bowl. Bowls trap heat. Abbott’s published comparison was that the project could push the local microclimate from semi-arid toward the Sahara.

That is one professor’s model, not a peer-reviewed environmental impact statement. The fact that no environmental impact statement comparable in rigor exists for a project of this size is itself the criticism.

The water

The published water plan calls for approximately 16.6 billion gallons per year at full buildout — Utah Clean Energy’s estimate, equivalent to about 25,000 Olympic-size swimming pools — drawn from a combination of groundwater wells, leased agricultural water rights, and, in later phases, reclaimed sources. Some of that water is to be cycled back to neighboring ranches and to an aquifer that feeds the Great Salt Lake.

Northern Utah is in its second consecutive year of severe drought. The Great Salt Lake hit a new record low elevation in 2022 and has only partially recovered. The lake’s exposed bed is the largest source of toxic dust inhaled by people on the Wasatch Front. Every credible study of the lake’s hydrology says the same thing: it needs more water, not less. A new industrial user with a 16-billion-gallon annual claim, no matter how artfully its mitigations are described, is moving in the wrong direction. Nearly 3,900 formal protests filed by ordinary Utahns with the State Engineer say the same thing in plainer language.

The developer’s response has been to emphasize cooling efficiency — newer closed-loop and air-cooled designs really do use far less water than older facilities. We accept that. The honest reading is that a nine-gigawatt campus using state-of-the-art cooling still consumes a staggering amount of water, because nine gigawatts is a staggering amount of computation. Efficiency does not repeal arithmetic.

What we are not arguing

We are not arguing that the United States should not build AI infrastructure. We have written before about the power-wall constraint the AI industry faces, and about the labor reshuffling the same wave of AI capex is producing at the companies whose servers will ultimately fill campuses like this one. We are not arguing that Utah should not host data centers — the state’s land and tax posture make it a reasonable home for them. We are not arguing Kevin O’Leary is acting in bad faith.

We are arguing that the largest single industrial project in the state’s history, sited in a closed valley next to a dying lake, should not be approved in a process the affected residents experienced as a bait-and-switch by a state agency they didn’t elect. The right answer is not necessarily “no.” The right answer is “show your work” — a full, public environmental impact statement, an independent grid-and-water-supply study, a binding commitment on heat-island mitigation, and a vote the people of Box Elder County are actually allowed to lose.

The referendum filed last week is the first attempt to force that. Whether it succeeds or fails, it has already exposed the underlying problem: Utah built, very quietly, a piece of governance — MIDA — capable of approving projects at this scale on land it controls without meaningful local consent. The Stratos vote is the first time most Utahns have seen what that machinery can do. It will not be the last project that runs through it. The democracy question — who gets to decide what gets built, where, and at what cost to the air, the water, and the federal-state balance of power over land — has to be answered before the next nine gigawatts arrive, not after.

The vote happened. The conversation is overdue.