Nearly 4,000 local residents and environmentalists have objected strongly to the proposed datacenter, pointing out that the datacenter will pull water and raise temperatures in an already drought-hit region.<\/p>\n
Latest Videos From![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.techradar.com\/media\/img\/techradar_logo_v2.svg\"){kind=logo}
<\/p>\n
You may like<\/p>\n
Datacenter raises ecological concerns<\/p>\n Kevin O\u2019Leary, the venture capitalist and Shark<\/a> Tank star, is backing the project, and has made several statements in an attempt to quell concerns about the development.<\/p>\n Speaking to Fox News<\/a>, O\u2019Leary said, \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a bigger site in the world than this. It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we are not messing around, we are going to get this done, move it forward and provide the compute power to our AI companies that defend the country.\u201d<\/p>\n The Chinese likely aren\u2019t the greatest concern for those opposing the project. Many are concerned about the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, which is already under threat from a recurrent drought and agricultural water diversions. The datacenter would likely divert more water from the lake, unless the developers are planning to source cooling water from outside the county.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not gonna drain the Great Salt Lake. That\u2019s ridiculous. We are gonna create incremental jobs,\u201d O\u2019Leary said in a post on X. Evidence from other projects suggests that local job growth from data centers is short term, and almost entirely construction-based.<\/p>\n For those worried about the energy consumption of the site, O’Leary said, \u201cWe are building power from scratch, from the pipeline. We are going to burn it with turbines, clean.\u201d For the uninitiated, natural gas is a fossil fuel, and burning produces pollutants that have contributed to man-made climate change.<\/p>\n Gas turbines also present a second, less well known phenomenon. Each turbine operates like a commercial jet engine, but instead produces electricity. As the data center will have a 9GW energy consumption when it is completed, the campus will likely be as loud as a large airport. In several instances, the infrasound produced by datacenters has made local residents sick<\/a>.<\/p>\n O\u2019Leary has also claimed in a video on X<\/a> that those opposed to the data center are \u201cprofessional protestors\u201d being paid to object to the project.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n A group called the Box Elder Accountability Referendum has applied for a referendum on the decision to build the data center. If the referendum is signed by the 5,422 registered voters in the county within 45 days, another vote will be held in November.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of speaking with us, Kevin O\u2019Leary went on social media saying we were out-of-state, paid protesters, and we don\u2019t want people from out-of-state making decisions for us,\u201d said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum push. \u201cThe only thing he\u2019s right about is that we don\u2019t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Via The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n <\/a><\/p>\n Follow TechRadar on Google News<\/a> and add us as a preferred source<\/a> to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Utah will be the home of a new 40,000 acre datacenterThe datacenter will consume more power than the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-232084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/diM9tpwF2Lz85R8q85CT78.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n