Data centers may be becoming the thing everybody loves to hate, but they support the foundations of the Internet economy, touching all our lives for better or worse.
The digital cloud doesn't exist in the clouds. It lives in thousands of nondescript buildings scattered around the world, consuming vast amounts of electrical power and water. The AI revolution promises to drive further proliferation of data centers.
The Stratos Project, a sprawling campus that would be the world's largest data center proposed by celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary in Box Elder County, brought the issue home to Utah this year, sparking a contentious debate over the costs and benefits of data centers to the communities that host them. To demystify the data center drama, the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy produced a web page that provides an in-depth primer on data center operations and ways to regulate them.
Titled "The Elephant in the Desert," the interactive article is the work of freshly minted University of Utah graduate Alex Kellgreen, a creative content producer for the Wilkes Center.
"The tool allows users to explore a map of every operational data center in Utah. You can find out how big they are, how much power they use, where they get their power from, and how long they've been around," said Kellgreen, a communication major who begins graduate studies this fall in the U's Department of Communication.
These materials are sourced from Data Center Map, an online database of the world's data centers, currently numbering 4,703 in the United States alone.
"In addition to the map, users can learn about data centers in general: what they do, how they do it, and why exactly they have such tremendous environmental impacts via increased emissions, exorbitant heat production and intensive water use," Kellgreen said. "Users can also learn about the leading policy recommendations for responsibly regulating data centers worldwide. The article compares Utah's most recent legislation to the recommendations, and grades them based on how well we're meeting those recommendations."
The Wilkes Center plans to update information on the site as new facilities come online. Utah's latest proposal calls for a 500-megawatt data center in Tooele County near the south shore of Great Salt Lake.
For Kellgreen, the interactive site was a summer project between graduation and graduate school.
"I couldn't believe how many data centers we already have. They only started making headlines in the past couple of years," he said. "When I told my parents about the Stratos drama, their first response was, 'What's a data center?'"
A key take-home from Kellgreen's research illustrates why artificial intelligence consumes vastly more power than conventional computing.
"It's not a difference in scale, but a difference in kind," he said. "AI computing uses completely different chips than traditional computing, and their power requirements are enormous. The cloud isn't an intangible ether of bits and bytes; it's hardware. Hardware that gets really, really hot."
It turns out that water, which is scarce in Utah, provides the best way to keep this equipment cool.
"Air conditioning just doesn't cut it," Kellgreen said. "Unless we invent something new, massive data centers are going to mean massive water use. There's no way around it."
Citing a 2025 study by the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the piece concludes by highlighting several policy initiatives states can implement to mitigate data centers' impacts, such as energy efficiency standards, water use reporting and emission-reduction incentives. Utah is not fully pursuing any of them at this time, according to Kellgreen's reporting.
"This isn't a difficult problem to solve. We just have to have the courage to pass the right laws," Kellgreen said. "Still, Utah isn't doing it. Our approach is piecemeal, and there's no way it can keep up with the rate of development from the Kevin O'Learys of the world."
Banner photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Jeffrey Morgan, iStock, Getty Images Plus and Zigmunds Dizgalvis.
