How the insatiable thirst of datacenters is leaving communities across the US high and dry

Automatically composed with AI from the cited sources

Box Elder County commissioners last month approved the Stratos datacenter development, a project twice the size of Manhattan backed by Kevin O’Leary that would double Utah’s entire energy use and raise state emissions by roughly 50%. Separately, a Meta-proposed datacenter in rural Louisiana would require 10 gas-fired power plants to produce 7.2 GW, equivalent to the annual consumption of about 5.7 million homes, and an industry estimate puts total US datacenter water demand at 73 billion gallons by 2028.