Kevin O’Leary’s proposed 9GW "hyperscale" AI data center in Utah will consume double the state's entire electricity usage and generate the waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day.

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https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-data-center-could-create/

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It ain’t happenin’. They say it’ll cost “over $1 billion.” Yeah, no shit. That’s technically true but also meaningless. It would cost many billions of dollars, many more billions than Kevin O’Leary would ever be able to acquire. It’s nonsense, he’s not a serious person and we shouldn’t take anything he says seriously. He also said he was going to build a massive oil refinery in the US a few years ago. Never happened. Never gonna happen.

The only reason O’Leary ever had any money at all is because he sold the Learning Company to Mattel around the turn of the century for a lot of money. It was the worst financial decision Mattel ever made, and one of the worst financial decisions any company has ever made in the history of business. Mattel ended up taking a huge loss as a result of the acquisition but O’Leary got paid. He’s a terrible business person, none of his business ventures have ever been successful. He’s a charlatan.

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Shitheads like him should be sued to the ground. There can be no forgiveness for such tech plutocracy.

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But for the Stratos project, it will get dumped into the local environment of Hansel Valley, in the same geographic bowl as the power plant. That actually makes the data complex a 16 gigawatt thermal load project, the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.

What?… This is beyond catastrophically insane…

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If this actually happens this wouldn’t be isolated to just the state of Utah? I mean 23 atom bombs a day of heat, seems that would spread out? At the same time, that much heat would melt all the computer and servers. How much water would it need to be cooled?

Which doesn’t matter because Utah doesn’t have enough water to even service this so called data center. Much less the amount it would take to keep that thing cooled.

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Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system

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What’s the SI measurement for this? Would you use Joules or just “x⁰C”?

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Its continuous so W would be better than J, then people can easilly imagine how many bar heaters its equivalent to instead of how many atomic bombs (of unknown tonnage)

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Comments in Fuck AI@lemmy.world

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A ton of these “proposed” data centers are basically fraud - part of a confidence game.

They’re never actually getting built, they’re just lying to get people to give them money.

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Kevin is a douche canoe

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Douches and canoes are useful. They don’t deserve such disrespect.

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Don’t be so kind

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The man that calls himself Mr Wonderful? You don’t say.

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‘So much worse than I even thought’: Utah’s ‘hyperscale’ data center could create massive heat island near Great Salt Lake

The Great Salt Lake is already drying up.

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We truly are living in the stupidest timeline.

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Iowa alone generates more power from just wind than that. No reason Utah can’t do the same

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Can’t. Wind power is woke.

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The windmills are turning the frogs gay? /s

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But that’s not the plan

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What about a 900 GW data center?!?!??? We could run everything in one place!!1!1!1!1!!!

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.zip

This asinine and misguided project needs to be stopped right now. I’m tired of headlines talking about it as if A anyone wants it other than the billionaires and B it’s remotely reasonable even if people did want it.

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Don’t worry, it won’t get built, just like most other AI datacenters that have been announced.

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