In the wake of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement which spent decades uniting voices around informed consent, medical freedom, vaccine safety, and environmental chemicals a new grassroots surge appears to be emerging from rural America.
This one feels eerily similar in its urgency and cross-aisle appeal: fierce opposition to the explosive growth of AI data centers. What began as scattered local gripes has coalesced into a national reckoning over energy takeovers, water concerns, and corporate overreach that threatens communities while delivering questionable benefits.
Although lesser versions of ‘data centers’ have been around for sometime with small, narrow-focused footprints, hyperscale data centers are now dominating the market and driving an unprecedented infrastructure boom led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others.
Driven by generative AI and cloud adoption, hyperscaler-led capital expenditures and capacity are on a record-breaking trajectory. The market is expected to surpass $350 billion by 2034.
The freight train is led by “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” and “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” two President Trump Executive Orders fast-tracking the buildout of energy and water hungry AI data centers on federal and private lands.
It’s worth noting this energy and environmental corporate-government push is being delivered on the back of decades of ‘climate change’ public programming aimed to teach people scarcity and sustainable anti-consumption behavior change.
The most recent numbers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory project hyperscale data centers to consume between 60 and 124 billion liters by 2028.
The current flashpoint is Utah’s Stratos (or Stratus) Project in Box Elder County, a proposed hyperscale data center complex backed by investor Kevin O’Leary’s O’Leary Digital. Spanning more than 40,000 acres—twice the size of Manhattan—the facility would consume up to 9 gigawatts of power at full capacity, equivalent to lighting up an entire state’s worth of homes, businesses, and factories.
Water use for cooling and supporting natural gas power plants to run the center could reach 2 to 16 billion gallons annually.
Approved via a 3-0 vote by county commissioners, no referendum happened for taxpayers footing the indirect costs.
Hellbound and Down 