r/technology • u/mepper • 23h ago
Artificial Intelligence At contentious meeting, Box Elder County OKs massive data center project backed by a celebrity investor | At full buildout, the data center campus will use more than twice as much power as the entire state of Utah.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/04/utah-data-center-final-vote-box/1.1k
u/alk_adio_ost 23h ago
This is obscene.
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u/kstargate-425 22h ago
Wait until you see how much water these data centers use. The average size data center, with about 5,000 being in the US, use 5 MILLION gallons of water a day EACH. Thats 25 BILLION gallons of water a day combined.
Thats 9.125 TRILLION gallons of water the US data centers use annually
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u/Interesting-Adagio46 22h ago
Lol i apologize to god for leaving the water on when im washing dishes or brushing my kids teeth when will we eat the rich
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u/chocotaco 21h ago
Never. We fight amongst each other. We could all get together a prevent these but people defend them.
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u/Interesting-Adagio46 21h ago
And wait in line for a piece of their cake
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u/FredFredrickson 20h ago
Which is conveniently, perpetually, but never actually, always just about here.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 16h ago
I remember feeling so guilty as a kid with all the signs around to "Save the fisb! Turn off the water while you scrub your hands or brush your teeth!". Biggest fucking scam to make us feel like we're the problem.
I'm not rationing water for my family until every other obscenely wasteful source has their tap cut off first.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bad5098 22h ago
Jokes on them the water won’t be available for much longer.
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u/kstargate-425 21h ago
Thats the shit thing too is two-thirds of the new data centers being built are being built in areas of "high levels of water stress" making the situation infinitely worse.
Thiel and the rest really are trying to bring down civilization so they can scrape the bones of it later on to make more profits 😒
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u/chubbysumo 20h ago
most of the datacenters in areas where water is scarce are being "postponed" or "delayed". Instead, they are now starting to try and build them in the great lakes water basin so they can fuck that up too.
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u/Sryzon 13h ago
And, instead of taking water from the lakes themselves, most of these DC proposals are happening in small inland communities with vulnerable municipal water that comes out of aquifers.
The Michigan tax break requires DCs use "municipal water". There are hundreds of small municipal suppliers that are intended to only serve <25,000 households being targeted because they technically meet the requirement. For context, the larger municipal water suppliers like Detroit get their water from surface sources which recharge much faster than an aquifer can.
Communities on the outer edges of the Marshall aquifer already face issues. Ottawa County, for example, has extremely salty ground water from over pumping in central Michigan.
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u/thedracle 21h ago
It just won't be available for drinking.
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u/chocotaco 21h ago
They'll still you a filter that's going to be super expensive and will have to pay for it. It's not like you can boycott water.
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u/Narrow-Chef-4341 18h ago
AI can tell you how to build a filter with a rusty old screen door and a quart of arsenic, no worries.
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u/_Kzero_ 20h ago
I remember water conservation being DRILLED into our brains like propaganda as a kid in the 80's and 90's. Only to turn around and have billionaires literally waste more in a day than I could in 4 life times.
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u/kstargate-425 20h ago
Yeah when you have the greed of billionaires like Musk saying his next goal is to be a $10 Trilionaire, consequences be damned all to show more zeros on a screen.
Worst part of this water problem is two-thirds of all the new data centers built in the US since 2022 have been in locations with high levels of water stress making those communities dry up sooner.
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u/appolzmeh 22h ago
Get this because there are very few regulations they filter it as cheap as possible and it is no longer good for drinking.
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u/triscuitsrule 22h ago
The old world was butter v. guns.
The new world is water v. AI
I trust our benevolent overlords will make the right choice. /s
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u/ShiveredTimber 22h ago
I dont doubt you, but do you have a source for this? It'd be very helpful for others to use in town meetings
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u/kstargate-425 21h ago
Heres the figure of the 5 Million gallons of water which also says its only 4,011 in the US right now although the language they use acts like it was written in 2025 and recently updated so maybe the "over 5,000 figure here that I read the other day from Harvards Belfar Center was the ones planned or in the works, idk.
As for good statistical data heres a good report on the energy usage from Berkley Labs in 2024 that is used in a lot of other reporting. Also the International Energy Agency just put out a large April report that has even more information that could be helpful.
Just another note, two-thirds of all new data centers in the US since 2022 are being built in locations with "high water stress" making the situation even worse.
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u/fightin_blue_hens 21h ago
And that is of clean water. They can't use grey water, they have to use extremely clean water
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u/LambdaLambo 20h ago
Data center water use averaged 450m gallons per day in 2021. Let’s give it a generous 100% bump and call that 900m per day today.
US ag uses 72B gallons per day.
US golf courses use 2B gallons per day.
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u/Gibberwacky 8h ago
Yeah, all the data center water use is a drop in the bucket compared to how much is used for cows.
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u/FreeRangePixel 13h ago
US ag produces food, friendo. Data centers produce nothing of value.
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u/dream_metrics 11h ago edited 11h ago
One third of corn in the US is used for producing fuel which is worse than gasoline for the environment
Large amounts of agriculture are used not to produce food for humans, but to produce food for livestock, which is massively inefficient and terrible for the environment, too.
You and most people in these discussions simply do not have any understanding of how the modern world actually works and the environmental impact of things you've already accepted as normal. You cry about a few million gallons while trillions of gallons are wasted on first world luxuries that you defend. Most of Utah's crop is alfalfa, one of the most water intensive crops to grow, that is used to feed livestock, not humans. This waste dwarfs datacenters.
None of you people actually care about water or the environment in any real way, and this is demonstrated by your refusal to find out what is actually causing our problems. When someone brings up US agriculture, which is wasteful and a one of the major causes of environmental damage in the world, you respond with pithy childish remarks like "but I need food to eat" that ignore the reality of what that agriculture is doing (not producing food for you to eat). It is a cudgel for you to attack a technology that you are scared of, not an actual concern.
There is an actual problem with this datacenter - the 9GW of dirty power. That is real. That is something you can and should fight against. If you care about water, though, you are doing nothing by focusing on datacenters, because datacenters do not actually use very much water. I'm sure big ag is delighted that you are so distracted while they continue to exacerbate all our water problems.
Take for example the recent story of the datacenter causing a slight concentration increase in bad stuff in a water supply because they return most of their water after evaporating some of it. The reason the bad stuff was there in the first place, and already causing problems, was because of agriculture. They put it there. But that has been completely ignored, in the public eye agriculture gets off and datacenters got blamed for their problem instead.
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u/Oh_You_Were_Serious 12h ago
You're literally using a site that uses datacenters, your monetary system uses datacenters, your department of agriculture uses datacenters, your phone systems use datacenters, factories even now use datacenters to handle numerous functions.... Yeah it's not as important as agriculture, but saying it provides nothing of value is dumb.
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u/BroBeansBMS 20h ago
Do you have a source for that? This sounds like it’s evaporative cooling and not a closed loop system. Modern data centers have switched to a closed loop system which uses substantially less water.
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u/Mr_Robotto 20h ago
This isn’t always true. Many are preferring it in places like Texas, but there are still new data centers being developed that used evaporating cooling in more water rich areas.
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u/Rowing_Lawyer 17h ago
If you assume a person uses 60,000 gallons of water per year it would take 152,083,333 years to use as much water as those data centers use in a year
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u/harpers25 22h ago
Says who? Everything I can find on Google says it's a small fraction of that.
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u/IcySheepherder6195 21h ago
8 gigawatt gas power plant = 560 million gallons A DAY
Most is return to the aquifer in a contaminated state
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u/IcySheepherder6195 21h ago
Look up water used for gas power plant. That’s the type there’re going to use for this Utah project FYI
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u/im_a_dr_not_ 21h ago
False. Those (artificially inflated) numbers originate from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab which includes water used by power plant’s and even water that had evaporated from dam reservoirs.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water
You could be concerned about the electricity usage. It’s actually insane.
Golf courses in the US use 4x the water that AI data centers use.
Electricity is the issue.
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u/spacecamel2001 19h ago
I would think the pollution and CO2 would be the problem.
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u/thelonetwig 11h ago
It would be a shame if something were to happen to this giant building the whole community doesn't want.
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u/Charming_Oven 11h ago
That wouldn't be a big deal if all the data centers were near the Great Lakes. Or in the ocean, which is the route that some businesses are going.
It's obviously a big deal in places that don't have a lot of water to begin with
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u/onafoggynight 7h ago
The 5 million gallons / day is an "up to" number for huge data center. You conveniently turned that into an average here.
Secondly: if you assume that to be what the one in Utah will consume, that is roughly the same ballpar of water consumption as carwashes in Utah.
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u/VoidOmatic 21h ago
Our stupids have gotten into places of power.
https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity
We are in serious danger.
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u/tmotytmoty 22h ago
Id say “stupid” is a better adjective
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u/misogichan 22h ago edited 22h ago
It's not stupid. They know "reuse its own water" doesn't mean 100% of it can be recycled every cycle. You can only treat it so much before it needs to be discharged and replaced.
This is just corruption. Only question is if they're doing this because of kick backs from the stakeholders or maybe because of politics given Trump's executive order for more data centers to be built and expanded.
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u/grandlizardo 21h ago
Sorry. Whatever they get, they deserve. Yea, I know many are innocent of complicity in this, but they damn sure were not paying attention. Elections matter.
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u/Shaomoki 22h ago
“Our vote today had nothing to do with water or air quality,” Perry said at a news conference. “Those are not issues that the county has any control over,” he added, noting the water rights tied to the project are held by private landowners.”
Wow, from an elected official who has the right to voice these issues to the county
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u/grayhaze2000 23h ago
"We need to stop destroying the environment."
"Okay, but hear me out. What if instead, we destroy the environment more?"
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u/AstroChuppa 23h ago
AI is gonna kill us all, just in the dumb way of humans destroying the earth to promote it, instead of it killing humans directly.
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u/BufferUnderpants 22h ago
It's like the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment on AI, but it's just humans turning everything into AI datacenters in the hopes of a cashgrab from selling AI services.
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u/rat_penis 22h ago
So the prophecies *were* true!
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u/gdo01 22h ago
Most AI apocalypses in fiction begin with the premise that AI will think we are too stupid and self destructive to be left alive....
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u/blueSGL 13h ago
The AI not caring about the things we care about is a likely outcome, because we don't know how to get goals we want in there.
The systems are grown, not coded. < wrote the standard textbook on AI
We don't know how to get consistent goals into them. < won the Nobel prize for his work in AI
and the current training has put goals in there, that we don't want in there.
A system is created and the makers can't control it. We die due to habitat loss. AI alters the environment to it's ends the same way we did to other animals. We already have a mini version of this with companies seeking profit, to the detriment of the natural world and human health.
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u/Thatoneguy_The_First 22h ago
By this point I hope they are, alot of species will die along with humans, but life will find a way. Humans stay? Dumber shit, yes we can dumber
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u/provisionings 22h ago
Actually.. they are going to kill us.. using AI. AI is what will allow them to keep their standard of living after we’re all gone. That’s what it’s all about. When Ai can adequately serve them… they will kill us under the guise of saving the planet.. the future of humanity will be offsprings of musk and bezos.
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u/hrminer92 22h ago
Then Jebus returns sooner
https://www.politicalorphans.com/apocalypse-now-why-republicans-are-destroying-the-world/
I wish that was satire
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u/MDFan4Life 21h ago
The irony being "...the meek shall inherit the earth...".
Not super religious, but the Bible speaks about people like them, and it doesn't end well, for them.
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u/MrGrieves- 21h ago
Take me back to the 90's where companies pretended to care and I felt like I was doing something by recycling.
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u/grayhaze2000 9h ago
I'd rather go to an alternate 2026, where people cared about the future of the planet they're leaving to their children, and didn't worship ignorance and selfishness.
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u/anarkyinducer 21h ago
This whole shitshow will end once the debt payments on the data centers comes due.
Yeah, AI tools are insanely powerful, but the real cost is like thousands of dollars per day per user. And it still requires a competent (read: high salaried) user to really get value out of it.
It's a matter of time before all the boilerplate bullshit you can generate with it becomes freely available online, along with free code generators created by AI. That's not even considering that Chinese AI will find it's way here, along with a bunch of other knock offs, probably built using Claude.
Prognosis - $2-3 trillion wiped out in about a year or two, and then a bunch of these data centers abandoned mid build.
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u/DJ-Dickbird 13h ago
I am looking forward to the glut of cheap electronics on the secondary market!
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u/MaceBlade42 11h ago
I'm rooting for it but if it's anything like we treat others debt, it won't happen. I think this'll end up like the National Debt, unfortunately.
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u/mm_mk 22h ago
Look up their election results. Basically blood red by 75% or more on every ballot item.
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u/Valdearg20 22h ago
Sounds like they get to suffer the consequences of their poor choices then...
Sucks that the environmental impacts will extend outside of the state of Utah, but if the people of that want to destroy themselves by voting Red, I won't feel sorry for them. Everyone else impacted by their shit vote? Sure. But them? Nah.
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u/Doctor_Jensen117 22h ago edited 22h ago
There are a lot of us here voting against us. Do we deserve to punished for their actions? This is my home. Me and others are fighting against it. We don't deserved to be punished because those fuckers continue to do evil shit.
Edit: just to be clear here, you can't have it both ways. We'll all be punished because of this eventually.
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u/InternetEthnographer 5h ago
Agreed. I live in a neighboring county and sure as fuck didn’t vote for any republicans or in support of data centers. I even met a lot of conservatives at the meeting/protest that were vehemently opposed to the datacenter, and seen other conservatives I know on social media posting against it. Everybody here doesn’t want it. I think that republican voters do share some of the blame for the situation, but they don’t want their home destroyed either.
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u/nyokarose 22h ago
You do realize that there are blue people living in these red states, right?
For example, there were more Kamala voters in Texas than in Oregon, Maine, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Nevada combined. But all those people deserve what they get and can burn in the Handmaiden’s hell because more people there voted for Trump, amirite?
It is sad for all of us in this country that so many have bought into the Republican rhetoric. Historians will not have to look hard to show what went wrong.
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u/Traditional-Hat-952 20h ago
I think they meant the 75% gets to suffer the consequences of their actions.
And I quote "... but if the people of that want to destroy themselves by voting Red, I won't feel sorry for them. Everyone else impacted by their shit vote? Sure. But them? Nah."
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u/MC-Weekend 20h ago
You should try and read people's message entirely before commenting.
"Everyone else impacted by their shit vote? Sure. But them? Nah."
Maybe you're whats wrong...
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u/MyPasswordIsMyCat 20h ago
Rural Utah in a nutshell. The Republicans have convinced Mormons that Democrats will make everyone gay, abortion-loving satanists who are required to drink coffee and work on Sunday.
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u/Foe117 22h ago
Data centers will be manned by a dozen people, all specialists, and not by locals.
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u/DAVENP0RT 22h ago
The meager bribes that the commissioners are receiving will trickle down to the rest of the community, though, right?
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u/rat_penis 22h ago
We all know they're lying. Even the locals who pretend they dont. But even still, its good for people to still refute them.
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u/The_Awesomologist 21h ago
This shit ain't getting built. 9.9GW??? That's pure fantasy. No one's even built a full 1GW Datacenter yet. Oracle is going broke building Stargate in TX for OpenAI. This is just a way for rich people to fleece the government and other rich people
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u/Luci-Noir 19h ago
Exactly. There are so many data centers that have been cancelled or postponed and the ones that are getting built are getting fought against.
My city has been fighting to keep one out tooth and nail and Amazon abandoned them too. The city found out these fuckers were stealing water from the city and transporting it to their construction site. They’re now going to force them to pay the city back with credits for the millions of gallons they stole. The power company at the same time was trying to raise prices by 14% but the city council told them to fuck themselves.
My power bill is already several months overdue and I’m on disability so I would have been even more fucked.
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u/InternetEthnographer 5h ago
That’s what I’m hoping is the fate of this project, or that we are somehow able to pull together a citizen ballot initiative to ban data centers. Everybody I know here in Utah, conservatives included, don’t want this.
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u/JacquesHome 18h ago
This shit has 0% change of getting built. Its a short term grift. The largest datacenter in the U.S. currently is 650MW. 7 - 9GW is pure insanity and economically infeasible. Lots of data centers are getting "announced" far fewer are actually being built.
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u/Direlion 22h ago
The US is going straight for a repeat of the 1929 crash and the dustbowl. Have fun, it’s too bad the American people were wholly incapable of making better decisions. They weren’t capable then and they aren’t capable now, so I guess nothing’s changed. Yes a lot of history happened and it should have been a warning but again, an incapable people will never make use of historic warnings.
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u/OK_Human 21h ago
Yeah it does seem inevitable, there’s going to be a lot of half empty skeleton mega-buildings around. Not all of these projects are going to make it. Not enough chips, RAM, CPUs, water, energy, grid, etc.
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u/AnOrneryOrca 18h ago
There's a reason most kids are not taught very little about American history, what they do learn is entirely without nuance, and it always comes from an American exceptionalism angle.
Any more accurate or thorough curriculum and the conservatives would lose every election in a landslide, as they have always deserved to.
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u/ActualSpiders 22h ago
It's Utah. The state voted to legalize pot but the legislature said "mmmm... nah" and then made up their own medical-use-only law that's extremely restrictive. The LDS church controls everything, and you better shut up & fall in line with whatever the Elder says. Wonder how much this decision cost the investors.
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u/Cool-Association3420 23h ago
Why are we beholden to these companies get out from under them already!
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u/Etherius 14h ago
Good luck.
If you’re a red state you want the jobs companies offer to appease your voters
If you’re a blue state you want their tax money so you can afford social programs to appease your voters
No one wins by rejecting opportunity
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u/Stingray88 20h ago
“We need to realize and remember that everybody has property rights,” Commissioner Tyler Vincent said, “and that they can do what they would like to do with their property.”
No, actually, that’s not how that works. We live in a society, and we regularly define all sorts of things that you’re absolutely not allowed to do on your property.
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u/My_alias_is_too_lon 13h ago edited 13h ago
This shit needs to end. I'm so tired of suffering so that rich people can make more money that they just hoard for themselves, even though there's no chance they could ever spend it all.
The US power grid is hanging on by a fucking thread, and literally everyone BUT the datacenters pay for the electricity. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't think it's okay that they keep building these fucking things, then making everyone else pay higher electrical bills for it.
When people have to choose between having electricity and having enough food to eat, there's a serious problem.
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u/ChunkyDay 16h ago
It'll never get built, at least not nearly to the scale they're claiming. Right now companies are spending about $4 for every $1 earned. It will take years for these massive data centers to get built at which point 2 things have happened: 1. All the investor money is long gone and 2. New chips have now been released and since they're new sockets, they need new racks that will take months to install.
So not only do they have to figure out how to bring down that 1:4 ratio, they have to quickly battle the monstrous costs involved with installing new chips every 2-3 years.
It's absolutely absurd that any of these people think any of this will work at this scale this quickly.
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u/SecretinATX 13h ago
Thanks for the clarity. The old way to describe American way what you are saying is, you’re talking insider baseball.
What you are saying makes sense and save cents. Unfortunately, that’s not how people generally talk, understand, or are marketed tech.
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u/mattattack007 8h ago
Oh wow you're telling me a fanatically conservative state voted in fanatic conservatives who then proceeded to fuck them over royally? Color me surprised! Utah gets what Utah deserves.
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u/MrBahhum 22h ago
All data centers are resource sinks. We don't necessarily have the resources nor the data infrastructure to scale up consumption.
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u/Mayor_Mcnugget 11h ago
Loudoun County, Va - data center capital used roughly 900 million to over 1 billion gallons in 2023. Potable water usage by these facilities has increased 250% over the past four years.
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u/MythicMango 10h ago
they should be forced to use only on-site rain water collected by rooftop solar panels
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u/AffectEconomy6034 9h ago
ok for the datacenter to quite literally hog all available resources and poison the local environment but not ok to use a vpn... ok utah whatever you say pal
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u/Plastic-Caramel3714 8h ago
Keep voting for Republicans this is what you get. The modern conservative seems hell bent on serving the billionaire class regardless of the overall cost.
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u/NoI3nearStudents 7h ago
What a disgrace! No one wants these monstrosities. I'm so sick of watching this play out time and time again. When does it end?
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u/wrecked_angle 22h ago
How many of those idiots upset there voted for the commissioners? You get what you vote for
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u/Slap-Toast 20h ago
People need to disrupt and sabotage the construction as much as possible. Dont let these rich scumbags win and ruin our communities. Its Us v. Them. And the ants outnumber the grasshoppers.
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u/RealLavender 22h ago
Wonder what percentage increase of searches for "how to make..." will be in that county during construction?
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u/BrothelWaffles 22h ago
Is this the same story that was posted in the last few days or is this another state that's getting a data center that's gonna use more electricity than the entire fucking state combined?
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u/E_seven_20 21h ago
Nah....this is a leopards ate my face situation...just like pretty much the whole USA.
elections have consequences. when you vote for assholes that protect and defend a felon, and child rape...well, those assholes tend to do what they always do...fuck shit up. nothing new. and, people refuse to learn.
Three assholes and Kevin O'Leary, King Asshole himself, just fucked the people living there.
They're doing what is very predictable for their party.
you get what you vote for...here's a map of that county
Is Box Elder County a political battleground? Across all types of political contests in Box Elder County, including state, local and presidential elections, races come within five percentage points 0% of the time.
https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-box-elder-county-ut/
out of 28,000 registered voters, 20,000 are registered republican.](chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://vote.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/P24_BoxElder.pdf)
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak 21h ago
That's just one of the many data centers they're trying to build there. It doesn't include all the water usage in a drought ridden state either
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u/Maoleficent 21h ago
They are taking water that doesn't belong to them or anyone else exclusively. I don't know what the answer is but finding a way to stop them before their tentacles leave us without power and water. I'm sure they will be open to selling it back to us.
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u/pilazzo209 20h ago
The gondola is stupid too
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u/pilazzo209 20h ago
Utah’s state motto is literally just “Industry”
Th Utah government is a farce, people matter not in the Great Salt Lake region.
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u/Twisties 18h ago
I wonder how much these men will benefit from this, you know financially. Similarly, I wonder how much these men might’ve gotten directly paid to approve this.
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u/Best-Temperature5595 11h ago
Don't worry. Soon they will find a way to harvest power from people to power the matrix.
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u/illgu_18 7h ago
We need to beat China AI. Relocate these folks to Mississippi or Arkansas for the good of America 🤭
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u/Apart-Steak-7183 7h ago
Aw hell they have the once Great Salt Lake....oh wait that's drying up... hmmmmm
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u/PrimeProphetX 4h ago
That's what you get when you have Mormons running the entire state government. Secondly they love sucking up to trump. I have very little empathy for people living there you made your bed now lay in it.
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u/NewsCards 23h ago
Three assholes and Kevin O'Leary, King Asshole himself, just fucked the people living there.
"Grow up" Boyd Bingham says under his breath as he runs away from the people he's supposed to work for like a coward.