Stratos ...

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Worse than tulips, totally insane but it's money, right? Silicon no longer works, period. Between the heat issue and the fragility issue, the need to move to photonics is now but according to the "boffins" wanting to build this monster, it doesn't matter. Another question to ask is, for what problem is this project intended to solve and, because tech never sleeps, will the tech be current when this bad boy is turned on? Simply incredible without question.

Dubbed the Stratos Project and backed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, the sprawling facility will devour up to nine gigawatts of energy, its developers say, which is more than double the electricity used by the entire state. 

That epic energy bill comes with another cost, albeit the kind that won’t show up on the developers’ books. On top of the nine gigawatts of power, the facility will produce another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat, according to Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University who shared his calculations with The Salt Lake Tribune.

That brings its entire “thermal load” to a jaw-dropping 16 gigawatts

It gets better

Petitioners react as the Box Elder county commission announces approval of a large datacenter
on 4 May 2026 in Tremonton, Utah. Photograph: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up.

Better still ...

Channeling Stratos ...

Exacerbating the issue, the Stratos Project is anticipated to use on-site gas power generators that run round the clock, allowing the facility to operate off the local power grid — a common modus operandi for large scale data centers that need a way to quickly secure huge amounts of electricity. 

The problem, however, is that this concentrates all the waste heat into the same area, when it’s typically dispersed far from the power plant itself at the homes and businesses it sends power to. 

And that area, in the case of the Stratos Project, is the Hansel Valley, which already acts as a bowl for trapping air.

The magnitude of the disruption is difficult to comprehend. In a jaw-dropping illustration, Davies calculated that the project would be the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”

If nuclear bombs are hard to wrap your head around, try Walmart Supercenters. In acreage, the Stratos facility will be equal to about 2,000 of those big box stores — but its energy footprint will be that of 40,000 Walmart supercenters, or 2,000 Walmarts stacked 20 deep, he wrote in a summary of his findings.

WTF applies

BRT wrote about the ticking time bomb regarding the Great Salt Lake. Read it if you dare.