Data Centers Just Keep Getting More Massive and Apocalyptic

The film’s early focus on COVID-era social conflict has shifted in relevance toward a storyline about hyperscale data center development in rural New Mexico. A small town is pressured into adopting a massive project that fuels the emerging AI industry while worsening conditions for nearby residents. Since the film’s release, proposed data centers have grown in scale and impact, with some projects projected to consume more electricity than the rest of their host state. The described example is a Stratos AI data center in Utah, planned across multiple sites covering tens of thousands of acres near the Great Salt Lake. The project is projected to require up to 9GW of power in full operation.

"Every day, the strife at the center of director Ari Aster's 2025 film Eddington seems less satirical and more purely and devastatingly documentary. At the time of its release, the public discourse surrounding was largely centered around the way it depicted the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the period so many refer to offhandedly as "lockdown" and the way that policies such as social distancing, masking and public health initiatives were co-opted into the culture war and absorbed into preexisting petty feuds between individuals."

"In retrospect, however, it's the film's storyline about the development of a nearby "hyperscale data center development" that now feels painfully prescient; the way a small town in rural New Mexico is ultimately bullied and steamrolled into the adoption of a massive development to fuel the nascent AI industry while making life worse for everyone in its vicinity. It's been less than a year since Eddington hit theaters, and yet in that time the country's largest proposed data centers have become exponentially, garishly monolithic in scale and impact."

"We're standing on the precipice of a new AI era empowered by single data center projects that, on their own, can consume more electrical power than the entire rest of the state they're built in. These are facilities that make the doom of Eddington, NM and its "tech positive" mayor feel almost quaint. The poster child for these behemoth data centers would no doubt be the so-called Stratos AI data center in Utah, which would be projected to cover more than 40,000 acres or 62 square miles of space over three different sites in Box Elder County in the state's northwest corner, bordered by the Great Salt Lake."

"Combined, that's an area significantly larger than the overall footprint of Manhattan, and it would indeed consume a megalopolis worth of electricity as well. It will supposedly require up to 9GW of power in full operation, which would otherwise be enough for r"

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