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BRIGHAM CITY — As Box Elder County Commissioners prepare to make a decision on whether to move forward with a mega data center, spanning some 40,000 acres in the western end of the county, some experts are warning that the growing wave of AI use in our everyday lives is inevitable. Matt Rosen is the CEO and Founder of Allata, a digital consulting firm based in Texas. "Ultimately, as a society, I'm an optimist. I feel like AI is going to make our lives better in a lot of ways," Rosen said. "I just think that as these data centers build, they need to do it in an open, transparent way, but not be completely restricted." The so-called Stratos Project would primarily serve to provide the US military with additional AI and cloud computing power. Rosen said while the US has the best AI models in the world, in systems like Claude and Chat GPT, China is far ahead in terms of raw computing power and infrastructure."They just have a larger power supply than we do. They're using solar faster than we are. They don't have the same regulations we do," Rosen said. "And so we're falling behind in the ability to use our brain because we don't have the infrastructure in the body to power it."In his monthly press conference today, Governor Spencer Cox said the mission of Stratos is important. "There is a national security piece to this that has to be acknowledged— the rate at which machine learning and artificial intelligence is changing (and) the dangers that that poses," Cox said. "What happens if an adversarial nation gets ahead of us in this space is something that we should all be worried about. And so we have an obligation." Rosen said the companies that build data centers and communities should work together in finding solutions, as the technology will continue to grow, adding that data centers should be responsible for supplying their own power, without pulling from local grids. "There definitely needs to be some transparency in how they communicate, but it can't be to the point where they're not allowed to build, not allowed to operate," Rosen said. "I've been in technology 27 years. I've been at the forefront of AI since 2022, and I'm not seeing any slowing of progress or need for the technology." The Stratos Project would produce its own power, using gas from a Nevada pipeline that they say has plenty of capacity. O'Leary Ventures CEO Paul Palandjian said that contrary to the some community worries, the process would use a new technology that uses little to no water. In addition very little water would be used in a closed loop system of cooling the data center, then capturing heat from the process to use in greenhouses and vertical farming. The cooling system would use a combination of glycol and water. He adds that the data center and power production campus would have to follow EPA standards, and that there are plans in place for an advanced form of carbon capture after the second phase. Rosen said unlike many technological fads, AI isn't going anywhere. "This is like the internet. This is like the mobile phone and it's coming faster than any of those waves before it," he said.
