Kevin O’Leary agrees to downsize massive Utah data center

Kevin O’Leary agreed to halve the size of his planned 40,000-acre data center in Utah after facing pressure from residents and activists. The Shark Tank star sent a letter to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams on Thursday, removing 19,430 acres from the project near the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area. Even with the reduction, Project Stratos will still cover an area larger than Manhattan, raising ongoing concerns about energy use, environmental impact, and pollution.

Kevin O’Leary agreed to halve the size of his planned 40,000-acre data center in Utah amid mounting pressure from residents /ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/utah-stratos-project-data-center-kevin-oleary and activists, as reported earlier by local affiliate ABC4 https://www.abc4.com/news/northern-utah/kevin-oleary-replies-president-adams-public-spread-misinformation-data-center/ . The Shark Tank star sent a letter to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams on Thursday, saying that he will remove 19,430 acres from the project, located in and around the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area. Kevin O’Leary agrees to downsize massive Utah data center Project Stratos will still have a footprint larger than Manhattan. Project Stratos will still have a footprint larger than Manhattan. The change comes just days after Adams called on O’Leary /ai-artificial-intelligence/942310/shrinking-kevin-olearys-mammoth-utah-data-center-project to slash the size of his Project Stratos data center by 75 percent, which would reduce it to about 10,000 acres. Adams also asked O’Leary to implement technology that minimizes water consumption, as well as to divert excess water to the Great Salt Lake, which continues to shrink https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/15020/ . O’Leary also said in the letter that he’ll cut another 620 acres in the northeast portion of the project near the highway, adding that he will “preserve a majority of the remaining acreage as open space.” Even with a smaller footprint of around 20,000 acres, Project Stratos will still cover an area larger than Manhattan https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/gridplan08 :~:text=The%20most%20generous%20measure%20of%20Manhattan%20today%20is%20about%2014%2C600%20acres%2C%20which%20makes%20for%20an%20increase%20of%20over%2025%20percent. — and data centers a fraction of this size still pose major concerns surrounding energy usage https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers-impact-on-electric-bills-water-and-more-a1040338678/ , impact on the environment https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine/articles/land-water-impacts-data-centers/ , and pollution https://www.environmentalhealthproject.org/post/the-dangers-of-data-centers . Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Most Popular - Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight - Nintendo confirms it will sell a new Switch 2 with replaceable battery in the EU - PlayStation is getting back to what it’s good at - A first look at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface Dev Box - As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise