Box Elder Already Has Three Toxic-Dust Hotspots. Kevin O'Leary Just Got 40,000 Acres of the Third Approved.

Patrick Duggan
2 days ago
6 min read

Earlier this month the Box Elder County Commission, in northwestern Utah, voted to approve a 40,000-acre AI and cloud computing campus called Stratos. The project is backed by O'Leary Digital and personally championed by Kevin O'Leary. It would consume up to 9 gigawatts of power, roughly double the electricity the entire state of Utah uses today. Power would be drawn from a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line. The land area is 2.5 times the size of Manhattan. The headline figure for total capital is around $100 billion. The stated rationale is competing with China in artificial intelligence.

I want to walk through three things that are documented in publicly available state and federal data and are not in the press release.

The first thing: Box Elder County is on the state DEQ map of toxic-dust hotspots.

The Great Salt Lake is at 36.7 percent of its historical full volume as of this reporting window. More than half of the original lakebed is now exposed dry sediment. Conservationists project the lake will fall to a new record low later this year. The University of Utah, USGS, USU, and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality have all published peer-reviewed and regulatory analyses on the chemistry of that exposed sediment. It contains arsenic, lanthanum, lithium, zirconium, copper, and several other metals at concentrations above EPA residential and industrial screening standards. Leafy vegetables grown in the Wasatch Front have been measured taking up arsenic and uranium from atmospheric deposition of this dust, even after thorough washing.

Utah DEQ has formally mapped the three largest dust origin hotspots. They are Farmington Bay in Davis County, Bear River Bay near Brigham City and Ogden, and the lake's northwest boundary in a remote part of Box Elder County. The same Box Elder County that just approved a 9-gigawatt water-cooled data center campus. The third hotspot and the Stratos site are not abstractly close to each other. They are the same geography. Whatever water the Stratos campus does not consume off the Ruby Pipeline's natural gas turbines, the surrounding atmosphere is already moving in suspended arsenic and lithium across the Wasatch Front to the people who live there.

The second thing: Utah already ran the experiment, fifteen years ago, on a much smaller scale.

The NSA built the Utah Data Center in Bluffdale in 2014. Public disclosure was extensive. There were Wired cover stories, congressional appropriations debates, neighborhood civic meetings, water-utility hearings, and the entire Snowden disclosure cycle. The facility's design was published, its mission was publicly debated, and its water and power footprint became part of the planning record. According to disclosed utility data, NSA Bluffdale consumed more than 126 million gallons of water between October 2024 and September 2025. That is roughly 390 acre-feet, enough for the annual indoor needs of nearly 800 Utah households. The baseline electrical draw is roughly 65 megawatts.

For reference, a modern hyperscaler campus that opened in Bluffdale at the same time — the DataBank Granite Point campus — used 7.7 million gallons over the same twelve-month window despite occupying 2.5 times more square footage. Modern liquid-cooling and dry-cooling designs can be radically more water-efficient than the NSA's older direct-evaporative design. The point is that Bluffdale is the case study Utah already has on what happens when you bolt a strategic-scale data center onto a state with a closing water budget. The data is public. The lesson is sitting in a state-utility filing.

The NSA Utah Data Center cost roughly $1.5 billion to build and consumes 65 megawatts. Stratos proposes to be roughly sixty-five times that footprint and nearly one hundred forty times the power draw. The intelligence community spent twelve years working through the public and environmental consequences of a 65-megawatt facility. The Box Elder County Commission approved a 9,000-megawatt facility in a single vote.

The third thing: the local civic record is in the documents.

Hundreds of Utahns formally filed to block the Stratos campus before the vote. The CNN Business reporting from May 9 names heat, emissions, dust mobilization, and drainage of the lake as the local concerns. Cache Valley Daily covered the filing volume. The Axios Salt Lake City local desk has been tracking it for weeks. The Salt Lake Tribune has run a series. The opposition is not abstract or partisan. It is the residents of the affected counties, the downwind metropolitan area on the Wasatch Front, and the public-health researchers at the state's flagship universities saying that the airshed and the lakeshed are already running an unpaid debt and a 9-gigawatt anchor tenant on the third dust hotspot is not the move.

The county commission approved it anyway. That is a decision that can be made. It is also a decision that gets reviewed when the consequences arrive — and the consequences are not speculative, because the dust is already blowing.

The fourth thing, which is the awkward one for the national-security framing.

The case for Stratos is being made publicly in terms of national security. Compete with China, the rhetoric runs, or fall behind in artificial intelligence. The honest version of that argument has to reckon with two facts.

The first is that the existing national-security data infrastructure in Utah was built by an organization that is openly part of the United States intelligence community, and was built with extensive public consultation, environmental review, and disclosure. Stratos is being framed in the same vocabulary without any of those instruments. If the argument is genuinely "national security," then the precedent on the books in the same state set a standard that is not being met here.

The second is that the population whose air and water this campus most directly affects is the population the national-security argument is supposed to be protecting. There is a coherent definition of national security that includes the ability of three million people on the Wasatch Front to breathe without inhaling arsenic-laden dust from a lakebed that the state failed to keep wet. That definition is not in the press release either.

What this post is not

This is not a post about whether the United States should build AI infrastructure. It should. There are good arguments for AI data center capacity in the United States and good arguments specifically for siting it where power is cheap and labor is available. There are also reasonable arguments that the energy mix should include natural gas on the path to a different mix later. Those debates are worth having.

This is a post about siting one specific facility on one specific piece of land that is already documented in the state's own regulatory data as a public-health hazard, in a region whose water budget is collapsing, in a state that already ran the experiment on a much smaller scale and learned things the press release is not citing. The local civic process has been clear about all of this. The county commission's vote did not turn on the data. It turned on something else.

When defenders talk about "asymmetric advantage," they usually mean the kind your adversary cannot replicate. The thing the United States cannot replicate, no matter how much capital it deploys, is a functioning Great Salt Lake. Once that lakebed dries out and the dust spreads, it is not on the menu for any amount of money or compute. The intelligence community figured that out somewhere between 2010 and 2014 and built accordingly. The May 2026 commission vote in Box Elder County figured the opposite.

The right number of gigawatts to put on the third toxic-dust hotspot is not nine.

Public sources used in this post:

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