A new Gallup poll found that almost half of Americans are “strongly opposed” to the idea of a data center being built near them. This may come as no surprise, especially if you live in Utah, home to one of the nation’s most contentious data center zoning battles.
The gargantuan project is called Stratos, and last week, the Box Elder County Commission approved its construction on a plot of land two and a half times the size of Manhattan, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank celebrity investor and one of the main financial backers of the project, claimed that those who objected weren’t Utahns at all, but were “professional protesters,” possibly backed by the Chinese Communist Party.
“I’m the only developer of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X. “We think over 90 percent of the protesters are actually not people who live in Utah...I don’t think it’s going to work out for them.”
That would be very dramatic if true. What we do know is that, as my Climate Desk colleague, the Guardian’s Oliver Milman, reported this week, there’s widespread opposition to the Stratos project among Utah-based scientists and residents who fear it will gobble up power and water—and even substantially increase local temperatures, which could push the state’s already fragile ecosystem into “active collapse,” noted Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University who conducted the thermal analysis.
Check out Oliver’s coverage of the coalition pushing to reverse Box Elder County's Stratos approval—and my own Mother Jones coverage of “Mr. Wonderful’s" big data center push.
—Sophie Hurwitz
