The county commission postponed its final vote on the project from Friday until today, and, as of the time of writing, no hyperscaler tenant(s) have been publicly named. Amazon , Microsoft , and Google are the three largest operators of hyperscale cloud infrastructure in the U.S., with Meta and Apple close behind. O'Leary Digital is also developing a companion Wonder Valley campus in Alberta, Canada, announced in 2024, which has not yet broken ground.
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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.\u00a0 Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.\u00a0 ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-22/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
ekio The day some researcher find a model that needs 100x less calculation for a given result, they will be like idiot with overpowered centers Reply
Shiznizzle I hope they are going to filter the exhaust of the thing if it is powered by gas as per article. If it produces more emissions than the state as a whole, how are they going to deal with them? 161.87426 Square Kilometers for the 40k acre's. I dont do acre's so had to convert it so it makes more sense to me I am a cyclist so Km i can do and 160 square kilometers in old money is 100 square miles. Nuts. Nuts. Nuts That i just insane. More pollutants than the whole state of utah for one facility. We are indeed approaching insanity. Most of the population is centered around Salt Lake City/Provo, where my cheating ex lives. So what if a few people breathe some bad air eh? Reply
bigdragon This is the least stupid data center thing I've read recently. They seem to be trying to do things right by providing their own power. There's still the problem of water and cooling. Still, nice to see a project that is trying to provide its own resources instead of draining all of them from the local communities. I have a bad feeling that these AI data centers will all be deserted Superfund sites in 15-20 years. Reply
quorm Take solace in the fact that this facility is unlikely to ever be built. The gas turbines and other essential elements are unlikely to become available before the bottom falls out of the datacenter buildout. That said, it's BS to say this is "off the grid." They're just planning to consume natural gas instead of electricity, and that would obviously affect prices and produce a lot of additional pollution. Reply
Why_Me quorm said: Take solace in the fact that this facility is unlikely to ever be built. The gas turbines and other essential elements are unlikely to become available before the bottom falls out of the datacenter buildout. That said, it's BS to say this is "off the grid." They're just planning to consume natural gas instead of electricity, and that would obviously affect prices and produce a lot of additional pollution. How much pollution does burning natural gas make? Reply
Ron Olbrey The energy in the total biomass of a football field of average forest is 233MWh, if burned to ash in one hour, that would be a continuous heat output of 233MW. A 9,000MW data center fueled by 40% efficient natural gas turbines would use 22,500MW of natural gas, 13,500 released as waste heat and 9000MW of electricity turned to heat in the data center. This datacenter will emit the heat of 96 football fields of forest burning to ash every hour, of every day, 365 days a year. Forget global warming, living downwind would be unbearable. Reply
WINTERLORD It said somthing bout the millitary if its for millitary wouldn't be good in modern times to build all ur eggs in one basket with drone warfare an such ul want smaller ones everywhere for the robot invasion Reply
Ron Olbrey Ron Olbrey said: The energy in the total biomass of a football field of average forest is 233MWh, if burned to ash in one hour, that would be a continuous heat output of 233MW. A 9,000MW data center fueled by 40% efficient natural gas turbines would use 22,500MW of natural gas, 13,500 released as waste heat and 9000MW of electricity turned to heat in the data center. This datacenter will emit the heat of 96 football fields of forest burning to ash every hour, of every day, 365 days a year. Forget global warming, living downwind would be unbearable. It would make much more sense to locate this data center in Calgary Canada. The whole province of Alberta hits a peak demand in winter of 12,384MW, mostly heating, while summer demand peaks at only 1,824MW. A 9,000MW data center creates 22,500MW of total heat that could be transferred by hot water to provide free heat to the entire city, with plenty left over to heat greenhouses to grow winter vegetables for local use and export. A tiny fraction of the total electricity production could light the greenhouses. The gas turbine exhaust could be vented directly to the greenhouses for 100% efficient heating and enhanced growth due to high CO2 levels. This is already done in many large scale greenhouses. This would make use of the heat that would otherwise be wasted, reduce overall energy usage and CO2 production by directly replacing gas furnace heating, reduce data center AC cooling load, greatly reduce water used for evaporative cooling, and eliminate most push back from the community. But then land in Utah is cheap and those subsidies sure are nice. Reply
xiq These data centers are gonna set us back so much on the fight against global warming. I'm sure there's some sort of law that limits how much pollution these data centers can cause, but ideally these shouldn't be powered by anything but solar energy. It's not like they're essential facilities that need to stay on while society gradually transitions to renewable energy. Reply
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