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‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Does anyone actually know the stated purpose of this project? It surely can't just be for LLMs but I haven't been able to find anything.
I would suspect department of war at that size
Sure but still, like, for what?
It's weird that it's difficult to identify. But there already is an NSA data center in utah, so maybe it is for the us government. You would think someone would have learned their lesson on how that one turned out?
The only way this kind of massive facility can be profitable is if its builders expect to use it to steal the jobs of legions of white collar workers. That's literally the only way this is profitable.
Based on what Oleary said in his interview with Tucker Carlson, he doesn't have a tenant yet. So billionaires are building these datacenters with the expectation that hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft will be renting that compute from them.
Will that actually come to fruition in a way that justifies the billions invested? I guess we will see.