The man behind the hyperscale data center in Box Elder County wants to make a point through fashion. In appearances on Fox Business News, CNN and with Tucker Carlson, celebrity “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary wore a black-and-yellow “Utah National Security” hat.
The massive data center, known as the Stratos Project, has dominated the conversation in Utah. Questions and protests have raged over the agency leading the charge, Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, along with concerns over water, air quality, heat islands and the effects on the nearby Great Salt Lake.
A look at O’Leary’s hat or his social media will tell you that he says this is about national security. And a race with China.
“I don't think there's a bigger facility in the world than this, and it shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we're not messing around,” he told the panel on “Fox and Friends” back in late April.
Gov. Spencer Cox made similar arguments before he acknowledged the backlash. In Utah, anything remotely related to artificial intelligence or data centers has had the national security label stamped on it, either to stop it or drive it forward.
So how did Utah become the place to be at the intersection of technology and national security?
To Aaron Starks, president and CEO of 47G, a private aerospace and defense tradegroup based in Utah and not affiliated with the Stratos Project, it boils down to geography and culture.
“Utah, from a geographic standpoint, offers a very dry climate that's great, because humidity and persistent precipitation in the air can often corrode and damage data centers, hard drives, wire harnesses, cabling, etc.,” he said. “That, that we don't have to worry about in a cool, dry climate like Utah.”
That same geography might seem like an argument against it, given the state’s desert landscape and limited water, but Stark said data center cooling is less water-intensive than a decade ago. Data center proponents have argued the same thing.
Since the late 1950s, Utah’s wide-open spaces and high elevation have drawn missile and rocket manufacturing and testing tied to the space race. Hill Air Force Base also had a big hand in the nation’s Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program.
At the same time, the state’s workforce has benefited from the global missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That’s produced thousands of bilingual or multilingual young people, long appealing to intelligence agencies and the military.
As U.S. priorities shifted from reaching the moon to learning what’s happening in other countries, defense agencies — public and private — sought the right employees.
“The strength of Utah’s industry has always been its people,” Starks said, pointing to the state’s emphasis on family and service. Utahns, he noted, speak more than 130 languages, “more languages per capita than anywhere,” making them strong candidates for agencies like the National Security Agency, which built a data center in Bluffdale in 2014, their first one in the U.S.
When O’Leary, Gov. Cox or Starks talk about AI and national security, they are not talking about ChatGPT. They’re talking about data processing. If you work in national security, you’re in the business of information, and computers can process information a lot faster than people.
There are several uses for AI in defense, said Chris Brusseau, vice president of artificial intelligence at Veox, an AI engineering and data company. A key area would be target identification. A good example is Project Maven, a Department of Defense initiative launched in 2017.
“What Project Maven does is it scrapes video footage,” Brusseau said, going through hundreds of hours of drone footage, satellite imagery, sensor data or even social media to identify threats.
For decades, the United States has had tense relationships with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Now, many U.S. leaders say the country is in a new kind of race, one that the White House has even compared to the Cold War space race. That tension has come to define one of the bigger reasons why data centers are spreading across the nation and landing in rural areas.
“The question we are trying to grapple with is this: which nation, China or the US, will control the technologies that are defining our military and economic power?” Starks said.
