What Josh found throughout the course of his reporting was that the way this data center came together — how it was planned, how it was announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the dark — ultimately created a political firestorm so severe it stopped Stratos in its tracks. The story is also a larger look at the AI industry's infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that buildout, and how the tech industry is running into the one obstacle it can't seem to spend its way out of: local democracy.
The issue with this is by the time Kevin O'Leary is talking about it on Fox in late April, MIDA has approved it. The county has not. The county didn't even know about it until about a month before this happened.
Everyone was racing — the developers against other speculators, O'Leary against rival projects chasing the same few tenants, Utah against other states, the United States against China — right up until they slammed into the residents of Box Elder County they had neglected to tell. The very county commissioners whose unanimous approval O'Leary touted on Fox were officially told the project was coming only five weeks before they were expected to vote on it.
Even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity, almost all of the world's demand is being served by a very few select locations. So you can still have this issue where you're basically powering the entire um world's AI demand from a few centers in the US and and and a few other data centers across the world. And that's a really really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.
The challenge with energy demand for AI is really a geographical and localized problem. So even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity, almost all of the world's demand is being served by a very few select locations. And that's a really really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.
The most valuable thing in the world is no longer money, you know, or jewels, or artwork. It's data. And all of this data lives in these Fort Knoxes that no one really talked about called data centers.
There's a lot of pressure to bring this new energy online very quickly because states are currently competing for the opportunity to attract these data centers, even though the financial benefits of them for the state has not actually yet borne fruit.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
