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There is a lot to be sorted through in the story playing out in Box Elder County about this massive

data center complex known as Stratos. As you've heard, developers have purchased roughly 40,000

acres north of Brigham City land they're devoting to this project that could eventually

require more electricity than the entire state of Utah runs on today. And so there are a lot of

threads to explore. There's water and its effect on the Great Salt Lake, of course. There's natural

gas generation and emissions. There's heat. And of course, what happens when rural landscapes are

transformed into these industrial computing zones? Also, who benefits, who bears the costs.

But we are going to begin our conversation by zooming out a bit.

Earlier this week, we spoke with the journalist Mateo Wong. He has a new article in the

Atlantic about what happens when artificial intelligence collides with the physical limits of

the real world.

Wong's story examines how generative AI is no longer just software.

It's becoming this enormous industrial system.

So AI feels weightless and virtual to a lot of us,

but the infrastructure behind it is intensely physical, and it's extraordinarily

energy-hungry. And that's part of what makes the story in Box Elder County so compelling.

It's a case study in this new physical reality of AI where a rural county is now confronting

planetary-scale computing demands.

And underneath it all is a larger question, just how much of the physical world are we willing

to consume in order to build artificial intelligence?

Mateo Wong's article is called Inside the Dirty Dystopian World of AI Data Centers.

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