Libs hate this one simple trick

Data Centers are not the issue (IMOP)

Last week, the Box Elder County Commission unanimously approved Kevin O’Leary’s 9-gigawatt data center campus.

I’m a socialist - I just liked the hook. The drought is real. Nine Western states are projected to hit critical water conditions by September. Utah peaks at 56% by September with 0% snow water equivalent remaining. This is not a normal year. This is not a fixable-by-shorter-showers year.

So when a 9 GW data center gets proposed, the instinct to panic is rational.

Here’s the thing: even in the worst-case cooling scenario, this facility pulls about 30 billion gallons per year. That’s roughly 1.8% of Utah’s total water diversions. With modern closed-loop cooling, it’s closer to 0.2%.

So how is the water used?

~64% of every developed gallon of water in Utah goes to feed livestock.

Alfalfa and hay alone consume 68% of all diverted water in the state.

Pasture and corn silage take another chunk. Add it up and the overwhelming majority of Utah’s water grows feed for cows, sheep, horses, and dairy operations.

Food people actually eat directly; vegetables, fruit, grain, accounts for a few percent.

The economic return on this water? Hay and alfalfa generate about 0.2% of Utah’s GDP.

That is the same contribution to the state economy as amusement parks. Utah is using 2/3 of its water for the equivalent revenue of Lagoon Theme Park.

29% of Utah’s hay harvest is exported overseas. About two-thirds goes to China.

That’s roughly 325 billion gallons of Utah water per year, compressed into bales and shipped to feed Chinese dairy cows.

The 9 GW data center everyone is panicking about? It uses 17 billion gallons in a typical year. The water we ship to China as hay would run 19 of these data centers.

The actual math:
- Utah diverts ~1.66 trillion gallons of water per year
- Agriculture: 82%
- Alfalfa & hay alone: 68% of the state total
- Exports to China: ~325 billion gallons (≈20% of all developed state water)
- 9 GW data center (typical hyperscale): ~17 billion gallons (~1%)
- 9 GW data center (efficient closed-loop): ~4 billion gallons (~0.2%)

The Great Salt Lake is dying. Utah’s own scientists have traced its collapse to upstream agricultural diversions in the Bear, Weber, and Provo basins. Not to server farms. Not to lawns. To alfalfa.

Meanwhile, alfalfa farmers pay water rates measured in cents per thousand gallons under 19th-century prior-appropriation law. Data centers pay full municipal rates. Guess which one has a financial incentive to conserve.

I’m not saying agriculture doesn’t matter. Farming jobs are real. Rural communities are real. Ranchers feeding their own cattle is a fundamentally different thing than baling water for export. There is a serious version of this argument that protects family farms while reforming what we grow and who we grow it for.

But pointing at a data center while we put our water on a boat to Shanghai is not that argument. It’s misdirection.

If we’re going to have a real fight about who gets Utah’s water in a drought, the question isn’t “data centers or no data centers.” It’s: why the fuck do we allow this?

Visit pnw-firemap.org to learn more about how Fire and Water are impacting the Western U.S.