Utah approved a data center so massive it's going to be more than twice the size of Manhattan It’s called The Stratus Project, it’s a AI data center campus in Box Elder County - The full project could cover over 40,000 acres, an area bigger than Manhattan - Total size will be around 62 square miles - The power demand is 3 gigawatts of electricity, roughly the output of multiple nuclear reactors - Environmental groups warn it could raise Utah's planet-heating pollution by nearly 50% - Estimates suggest the project's power systems could consume up to 16.6 billion gallons of water per year. (25,000 Olympic swimming pools) First let’s talk about power, it will actually use up to 9 GW of power. This is roughly double Utah’s current peak electricity demand. Only the first phase will use 3 GW Next let’s talk about water, Developers are now saying that they will use closed-loo dry (air-based) cooling systems to minimize consumption. But it’ll still use a lot of water This is bad news for water conservation. Utah is in drought conditions, the Great Salt Lake is shrinking. It’s visible and you can see it right now So why do we need this really, according to what I can find it’s going to be tied with defense contracts The data center will be tied to US defense priorities. It overlaps with Department of Defense areas and is advanced through Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority. Officials cite needs for energy resilience, secure computing power, and data storage for defense operations So this is a private data center but it’s not really a private data center…. Because it’ll be working with the government. One layer removed…

Utopia is not the standard. Reality is. Every civilisation has sins if you judge it by today’s moral standards. You can build an entire career doing nothing but listing them. That is easy. The harder question and the only one that matters is this: compared to actual, existing alternatives, who has done better? I am not claiming the West is perfect. It is not. No society is. But if you are honest about measurable progress on rights, equality, and self-correction, it is still ahead of every other major system in the world today. So stop asking "is it perfect?" That is a childish question. Ask: "compared to what?"