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The small Utah county fighting a massive data center

A rural county at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. A multimillionaire celebrity businessman. A shadowy state agency. What Box Elder County, Utah’s fight over a 40,000-acre data center reveals about America’s AI future.
Guests
Leia Larsen, water and land use reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune.
Vijay Gadepally, senior scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Co-founder of Radium, a cloud computing company. Co-founder of Bay Compute, a company primarily focused on data center energy reduction.
Also Featured
Brenna and Tameron Williams, residents of Box Elder County, Utah.
Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan, senior partners at Elevate Strategies, a political consulting firm in Utah that works to elect Democrats.
Greg Pirio, resident of Sterling, Virginia who lives near a data center.
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
This program aired on May 20, 2026.

