Paper Water and the Gigawatt Dream

In the southeast corner of Utah two buttes stand over the mesa, visible from every direction. Every tribe in the region calls them by the same name in its own language: Bears Ears. People have lived in the canyons below them for hundreds of generations. They left cliff houses, granaries and rock art going back at least five thousand years, and the country around them is still, in the words of the proclamation that made it a national monument, “one of the most intact and least roaded areas in the contiguous United States.” The same proclamation says: “For thousands of years, humans have occupied and stewarded this land.” ⁷⁷

That was not luck. The five tribal governments that asked for the monument, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni and two Ute tribes, say their people are “eternally obligated by their beliefs to serve as stewards of the land.” ⁷⁹ The Navajo have a word for green highlands like those at Bears Ears. It means places to be left alone. ⁷⁷ Far to the east the Haudenosaunee, the six nations most schoolbooks call the Iroquois, gave the same duty the name most Americans know. They call it the Seventh Generation. Their chiefs are to weigh each decision by what it will do to descendants who are not born yet, and their people are taught that they are borrowing the world from those who come after. ⁷⁰

Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789 that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” ⁷¹ Usufruct is a lawyer’s word for the right to use and benefit from property that belongs to someone else, without damaging it. ⁸⁶ Jefferson was writing about debt. He warned that a man who could bind those who came after him might “eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come.” ⁷¹ The rule fits land and water as well. A generation holds the deed for a while, and it may not spend what belongs to the next. Those are our forefathers on both sides, the ones who were here first and the ones who founded the country, and they left the same instruction. We the people are stewards. Most of us learned the short version as children: leave the campsite the way you found it, because someone is coming up the trail behind you.

Bears Ears holds riches of two kinds. One kind is on top of the ground and cannot be replaced. The other is under it: uranium, copper, vanadium and the rest of a list the government published this summer. On July 13 a presidential proclamation cut the monument from about 1.36 million acres to about 121,000, a reduction of 91 percent, and gave the minerals as one of its reasons. ⁷⁸ A mine closes when the ore runs out. The canyons took hundreds of generations to hand down. It is not up to our generation to undo that for the short term gain of corporations that want to trade preservation for temporary value.

Nobody is planning a data center yet at Bears Ears. I begin there because it is the plainest picture of a trade now being offered all over the West, in places with no monument and no name anyone outside the county would know. Something that took generations to hand down is exchanged for something that will be used up in one. The newest version of the trade is for water, and the buyers are data centers. The rest of this essay is about that.

Delta, Utah sits at the bottom of the Sevier River. The state stopped handing out new rights to that river in 1946 and to the groundwater under it in 1997. ¹ Think of the river as a pie that was fully sliced eighty years ago. Every slice has a name on it. Many of the slices are held through five regional water companies, and a big one belongs to the Intermountain Power Project, whose agency in 1979 bought 27 percent of the shares in those companies and now holds an average of 45,000 acre feet a year, renting what it does not use back to the farmers. ² The companies run their water on an agreement from 1938 that works like a bank account: if you do not use your share this year, you can hold it over to next year. ³

In June 2025 the county rezoned more than 1,100 acres of farmland next to that valley for a data center campus that its developer, Creekstone Energy, aims to make the largest in the world: a campus master planned for more than ten gigawatts, with its own natural gas generation and solar panels on 13,000 acres of state school trust land, the largest solar lease in Utah's history. ^{4 6} A second developer, Joule Capital Partners, broke ground between Delta and Fillmore on a campus whose first phase alone is to generate 1.3 gigawatts on site. ^{5 4 7} The state gave Creekstone a 50 percent tax credit for a promised 106 jobs. ⁶ A county commissioner, defending the approvals, said the projects would not exceed existing water rights. ⁷ In a valley where the pie was sliced in 1946, that can mean only one thing. Whatever water the campuses use will be somebody's slice first.

Delta is one valley. The same deal is on the table across the West, in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming and Oregon, and this essay goes to each of them. I use Delta because a small place is easier to see whole. A doctor learns more from one drop of blood under a microscope than from looking at the patient across the room.

Everything in this essay is gathered from publicly available information sources. It is in the state's water records, the county's minutes, the companies' public filings, the power companies' plans and the government's own laboratory reports. What is hard is putting it together and holding it up against the promises made by the billionaire driven data center companies. When you do, the picture is of a region that is out of water, that knows it, and that is approving the biggest industrial buildout in its history on the theory that the water will turn up later, paid for by the public and decided by almost nobody.

Hold the Sevier River up to the rule this essay opened with. Its true owners are the people who will need it two hundred years from now. We are holding it for them.

The Numbers That Actually Matter

Water in the West is measured in acre feet. One acre foot is enough water to cover a football field about a foot deep, 325,851 gallons, or roughly half an Olympic swimming pool. When Mesa, Arizona signed a deal with Google in 2019, a columnist at the Arizona Republic worked out that the plant's cap of 4,480 acre feet a year was enough for about 13,440 households, so an acre foot is about a year of water for three homes. ²¹

Electricity for data centers is measured in gigawatts. A gigawatt is a billion watts. A bright LED bulb uses about ten watts, so one gigawatt keeps a hundred million of them lit at the same time, all day, every day.

And the number that ties them together: the water a data center uses depends less on the computers than on the power plant behind them, and that is the number nobody puts in the press release. I will come back to it.

Data Centers Power Use and Concentration of Construction on Dry, Cheap, Water-stressed Lands

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory does this counting for the federal government. It found that data centers used 4.4 percent of all the electricity in the United States in 2023 and 4.7 percent in 2024, and it expects 11.8 percent in 2030. ⁸ Picture the country's electricity as a pizza cut into ten slices. Data centers eat about half a slice today. By 2030 they eat more than a whole slice, and the pizza has to get bigger to keep everyone else fed. The Electric Power Research Institute says 9 to 17 percent by 2030, and that seven states beyond Virginia could see data centers take more than a fifth of all their power. ⁹ The International Energy Agency says data centers will be nearly half of all the growth in American electricity demand between now and 2030, and that by the end of the decade the country will use more electricity for data centers than for making aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals combined. ¹⁰

The West is where a lot of it is being announced, and the drier the place, the bigger the announcement. A service that logs every published project counts 318.6 gigawatts of data center power planned or under construction in the United States as of August 2026, of which 90.4 gigawatts is actually being built. Texas leads at 85.4 gigawatts. Utah, a state of about 3.5 million people, is fourth at 18.7 gigawatts. New Mexico is eighth at 10.7 and Arizona ninth at 10.4. ¹¹ Bloomberg put every data center built or planned since 2022 on a map next to a map of water stress. About two thirds landed in places already short of water, and more than 160 new AI data centers went up in such places in three years, a 70 percent jump over the three years before. ¹² That is not bad luck. Land is cheap where water is scarce, and a county that has lost its mill and its mine will say yes to almost anyone with a ten figure check.

Two straws

A data center drinks through two straws. The first straw is in the building. Computers get hot, and the cheapest way to cool them is to run water past them and let some of it evaporate, the way sweat cools your skin. Berkeley Lab estimates American data centers used 66 billion liters this way in 2023, about 17 billion gallons, and it expects the biggest facilities alone to use 60 to 124 billion liters in 2028. ⁸

The second straw is at the power plant, and it is the big one. Most power plants boil water to spin a turbine, and then they have to cool the steam back down, usually in a cooling tower that throws water into the air as vapor. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory went through the published studies and put the middle number at 205 gallons of water lost per megawatt hour for a combined cycle gas plant with a cooling tower, 687 for a coal plant, and about 2 for a gas plant cooled by fans instead of water. ¹³ Berkeley Lab adds up the second straw for all American data centers at nearly 800 billion liters in 2023, twelve times the first straw. ⁸ Meta's own environmental report shows the same thing without meaning to: in 2024 the company used 3.1 billion liters of water at its buildings, and the electricity it bought carried 72 billion liters of water, twenty three times as much. ¹⁴ So when a company says its data center uses almost no water, ask which straw it is talking about.

Where the water is taken matters as much as how much. A 2021 study found that the West and Southwest hold about a fifth of the country's servers and supply about a fifth of their direct water and a third of their indirect water, yet they account for 70 percent of the industry's water scarcity footprint, because taking a gallon from the Great Basin hurts more than taking a gallon from Ohio. ¹⁵ The Dalles, Oregon, a town of about 16,000, fought a records lawsuit for thirteen months, with Google paying more than $100,000 of the city's legal bills, to keep secret how much of the town's water Google's data centers used. When the numbers came out, Google's use had tripled since 2017 and was 29 percent of everything the whole town used. In 2025 it was nearly 550 million gallons, nearly 40 percent, and the city still will not say how much Google is allowed to take at peak. ¹⁶ Imagine ten people at a table and one guest eating four of the ten plates, and the restaurant refusing to say how many plates he is allowed. Google reported using 10.9 billion gallons across all its data centers and offices in 2025. ¹⁷

The Utah projects show how this plays out. The well-publicized Stratos project in Box Elder County, a project area approved at 40,000 acres through the state's military development authority and since cut to about 20,000, filed for a change in water rights on March 25 and withdrew it on May 6 after nearly 3,900 protests were filed. The filing sought 1,900 acre feet a year from a spring for a gas plant. The developer says it will refile. ¹⁸ Utah Clean Energy did the math before the developer published any: depending on how it makes its power, the project as first proposed could use between 2 billion and 16.6 billion gallons a year. ¹⁹ The top of that range is about 51,000 acre feet, or roughly 25,000 Olympic pools a year, more than the entire Intermountain Power Project holds. ² The developer said on October 1 that the full project will use under 900,000 gallons a day after recycling, which is about 1,000 acre feet a year. ⁸¹ In Nevada, the Desert Research Institute looked at the twelve data centers in the utility's plan and found that in its middle case they would need about 9,647 acre feet a year for cooling and another 12,448 to make the electricity. ²⁰ The second straw was bigger than the first. In New Mexico, the state engineer's general counsel told a Santa Fe newspaper that the gas plants for Project Jupiter, a $165 billion campus the county approved with a thirty year tax break, would need nearly a million gallons a day, a figure the county is now trying to verify. ²²

The industry's answer is closed loop cooling, and for the first straw it could be a real answer. Microsoft says every design since August 2024 cools the chips in a sealed loop, like the radiator in a car, and avoids more than 125 million liters a year per data center. ²³ Amazon reports 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt hour. ²⁴ Meta reports 0.19. ¹⁴ The applicant for the Delta campus told the Millard County planning commission its 26 buildings would each use one to one and a half acre feet. ²⁵ But a modeling study posted in September found the catch every engineer already knew: cooling with fans instead of water cuts a data center's total water use roughly in half, and raises its electricity use and the water lost at the power plant by about a third. ²⁶ The water does not vanish. It moves from the building to the power plant, and in the Utah projects the power plant sits on the same land. Whether that plant is cooled with water or with fans is the whole question, and no public approval in Utah has answered it. Creekstone's own answer, announced in September, is a patent application for catching water out of its gas exhaust, which it says could make about 4,000 acre feet a year from two gigawatts of gas generation, and which the University of Utah, with Creekstone paying for the research, agreed to test and to help work out what building it at full scale would take, without knowing if it even will actually work. ^{27 87} Burning natural gas really does make water, and the math on two gigawatts running all year comes out near that number. Whether it can be caught, cleaned and used, and at what cost, nobody knows. The county rezoned the land fifteen months before the question was asked.

The bathtub

Now the supply. Picture the Colorado River system as a bathtub. The snow in the mountains is the faucet. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are the water in the tub. Everything the seven states, Mexico and forty million people take out is the drain.

In 1922 the states divided the river assuming the faucet ran at 16.4 million acre feet a year. It never did. From 2000 to 2024 it averaged 12.43 million. In 2024 the basin used 13.3 million, and from 2021 to 2024 the faucet averaged about 11.9. The Congressional Research Service says the basin is in a structural deficit, which is what a bank calls a family that spends $13,300 a year on a $11,900 paycheck and covers the difference from savings. ²⁹ The river was overdrawn in 16 of the 21 years from 2000 to 2020. ³⁰ The savings are the tub. On August 21, 2026 the Interior Department signed the river's rules for 2027 and 2028 after the seven states could not agree on a plan. Lake Powell's inflow this year was 37 percent of average; the spring melt was 18 percent. Powell and Mead hit record lows in August, and together they hold less water than at any time since Powell began filling in 1963. Arizona, California and Nevada will give up 1.25 million acre feet in each of the next two years. ²⁸ That is about 617,000 Olympic pools a year, or the water of nearly four million homes. Utah State University's Jack Schmidt and his co-authors calculate that the basin as a whole must use 13 to 20 percent less just to keep the tub from emptying. ³¹ And the faucet is not coming back: flows from 2000 to 2014 ran 19 percent below the twentieth century average, and about a third of that loss was heat, not a lack of snow. Warmer air drinks the river before the river reaches the tub. ³²

Utah's own tank filled to half this year. The snowpack peaked on March 9 at 8.4 inches of water, the lowest ever measured and about half of normal. ³³ The federal snow survey found April 1 snowpack at or near record lows across the whole West. ³⁴ On September 17 the state's reservoirs were half full, every part of Utah was in drought, and the upper Sevier River was delivering about a tenth of what the oldest rights on paper say it owes. ³⁵ The Great Salt Lake stood at 4,189.6 feet on September 30, about a foot above its record low and more than eight feet below what the state calls healthy. To fix it the lake needs about a million acre feet a year more than it gets, which means cutting water use across its watershed by 30 to 50 percent. ³⁶ The governor closed the lake's basin to most new water rights in 2022. ³⁷ Arizona stopped approving new groundwater subdivisions around Phoenix after its model found 4.86 million acre feet of demand over the next century that the aquifer cannot supply. ³⁸ New Mexico's fifty year plan projects a shortfall of 750,000 acre feet. ³⁹

This is the region in which, by the tracker's count, nearly 40 gigawatts of data centers have been announced in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico alone, and in which Nevada's utility reports 50 large projects asking for 16,930 megawatts by 2036, 22 of them with signed agreements for 5,725 megawatts. ^{11 40} Every one of them will get its water from someone who already has it. There is no other source. The faucet is turned all the way on, and it is not enough.

Paper water

Here is the part the press releases skip. In most of the rural West, water is not a stream. It is a number on a page. The irrigation company holds the water right and gives each farmer shares. Your share is a right to a slice of whatever the river yields this year, and under the Sevier River's 1938 agreement the part you do not use can be held over to the next year. ³ It works like a school lunch account. The number on the screen says how much you have. In a wet year nobody checks whether the cafeteria really has that much food. In a drought, the number on the screen is the only food there is, and the question is whether the cafeteria has been printing balances it cannot serve.

Numbers on paper standing in for real things have a long and bad history. Chicago's grain elevators were accused of issuing warehouse receipts for grain they did not hold, and in 1872 inspectors found that one firm's receipts for 300,000 bushels had no grain behind them. By then Illinois had written into its 1870 constitution a duty to pass laws against false and fraudulent warehouse receipts, and in 1871 it passed one. ⁴¹ In 1905 Fred Eaton, a former mayor of Los Angeles, went up the Owens River buying options on land and water rights and passing them to the city. The federal Reclamation Service was planning an irrigation project for the valley. Eaton carried its maps and papers that made him look like a federal agent, and the farmers who sold to him thought they were helping that project. The buying stayed secret until the Los Angeles Times broke the story that July. The aqueduct opened in 1913. ⁸⁰ Australia has spent more than nine billion of its dollars on a plan for the Murray-Darling river system, and the Guardian's Australian edition told the story under the headline “Ghost water, poor planning and theft.” ⁴² Western water law has a name for the right on the page as opposed to the water in the river: paper water. ⁸⁵ The Colorado River Compact is paper water, written on an assumed 16.4 million acre feet a year for a river that has averaged about 12.4 since 2000. ²⁹

Now put a buyer with $17 billion and a 2027 deadline into a valley whose water is a ledger. The buyer needs firm water and a clean title. The valley needs its ledger to look clean. Utah's own farm water report warns that moving water from farms to industry can use up more water than the paper says, because the water the farm used to return to the river is reduced or lost, and it says the real change needs careful study. ⁴³ Whoever knew where the campus was going before the rezone could buy shares at hay prices. Whoever keeps the ledger decides which accounts have extra to sell. Whoever tells the lenders the water exists will be a company board or a state engineer who does not keep the shareholders' ledger. None of that needs anyone to break a law. It needs only a small institution built for a village to be handed the biggest deal in its history with no audit, no disclosure, and nobody whose job is to doubt it. The same is true of the water district in Nevada, the groundwater basin in Arizona and the irrigation company in Idaho. The structure is the weak spot.

How much of it is real

The other thing the records show is how much of the boom is paper too. Think of the power grid as a party. Berkeley Lab counted about 2,290 gigawatts of generation and storage waiting for permission to plug in, and found that of everything that asked between 2000 and 2019, 13 percent actually showed up and 77 percent cancelled. ⁴⁴ Wood Mackenzie counts 331 gigawatts of announced data center capacity nationwide and says about 40 percent is really being worked on. ⁴⁵ Oracle and OpenAI cancelled the expansion of their flagship Abilene campus in March. ⁴⁶ Texas, where the grid operator had over 474 gigawatts of requests to plug in, about 90 percent of them data centers and more than five times the most power Texas has ever used at once, froze new data center hookups in August pending an audit. ⁴⁷

Utah is the most over announced state in the region. The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute counts 48 operating data centers in the state with about 920 megawatts, and seven under construction adding about 2,600. ⁴⁸ Against that, the tracker's 18.7 gigawatts of Utah pipeline is mostly three campuses, Stratos, Creekstone and Joule. ¹¹ Stratos has named no anchor tenant. Creekstone has named one, for 50 megawatts. ^{50 82} Stratos agreed in June to shrink from 40,000 acres to 20,000, and in August the governor called the state authority's process not good. ^{50 49} A Utah outlet summed it up: everything but water, money and a tenant. ⁵⁰ Iron County paused new data centers for 180 days in May after a proposal for a data center on 640 acres. ⁵¹ Nye County, Nevada banned them outright in the Pahrump basin in August, the first ban in the state, because the aquifer is already promised to more people than it can serve. ⁵² Arizona's utility regulator counts about two dozen operating data centers at more than 2 gigawatts and more than 10.6 gigawatts planned. ⁵³ Xcel Energy in Colorado had, as of August 2025, 6.2 gigawatts of power plants and data center applications for 5.8. ⁵⁴ Wyoming's largest data center, a 2.7 gigawatt campus south of Cheyenne with its own gas plant, turned out in July to belong to Google. ⁵⁵ Oregon's cities and counties are moving to open 9,100 acres to new data centers on top of the 2,900 acres they already cover, and the governor has called the industry's effect on the state not sustainable. ⁵⁶

Some of these will be built. The ones with real tenants and real power contracts probably will. The point is that counties and states are trading real things, farmland, water rights, school trust land, tax money and the last quiet places on the map, for announcements, and the announcements are written so the developer keeps the choice and the public keeps the risk.

What one gigawatt drinks

Nobody publishes a water budget for the West's data centers, so here is one, with the arithmetic shown so anyone can check it. A gigawatt of data center running about two thirds of the time uses about 5.7 billion kilowatt hours a year. Through the first straw, at Amazon's 0.12 liters per kilowatt hour, that is about 550 acre feet a year; at the national average behind Berkeley Lab's 2023 figures, 66 billion liters over 176 billion kilowatt hours, it is about 1,700. ^{8 24} Through the second straw it depends on the power plant: about 35 acre feet a year if the gas plant is cooled with fans, about 3,600 if it uses a cooling tower, using the laboratory's middle numbers. ¹³ Add them up and one gigawatt of data center in the interior West uses somewhere between about 600 and about 5,300 acre feet of water a year. The low end is about 300 Olympic pools, or the water of 1,800 homes. The high end is about 2,650 pools, or the water of 16,000 homes. Which end you get depends on decisions made after the rezone and told to nobody.

If the pace continues

Five years from now, in 2031, count only what is already built, being built, or covered by a signed utility agreement in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado: Utah's 3.5 gigawatts, Arizona's 2, Nevada's 5.7 under signed agreements, some of it not due until 2036, Wyoming's 2.7 at the Google campus, and the 2.5 the tracker lists for Project Jupiter in New Mexico. Call it 16 gigawatts. ^{48 53 40 55 11} That is roughly 10,000 to 85,000 acre feet a year, the water of about 29,000 to 254,000 homes, in places where the state has already stopped handing out rights. The first thing that happens is the price of a water share goes up, and the first farmer to sell does fine. The ledger still balances, because the water office simply moves the credits from the farmer's account to the campus's account.

Ten years from now, in 2036, take the roughly 65 gigawatts announced across those six states and assume that 40 percent of it gets built, the share Wood Mackenzie says is under active development nationwide. In Utah and New Mexico, it says, only a small fraction has got that far. ^{45 11 40 53 54 55} That is about 26 gigawatts, and roughly 16,000 to 138,000 acre feet a year. The high end is the water of about 414,000 homes, about 68,000 Olympic pools, evaporated every year to cool computers and the turbines behind them. By then the easy shares are gone. The water that moves now comes from whole farms going out of production, and from towns whose growth was going to use it. The ledger still balances, but the fields the credits used to water are dry, and the report the state commissioned on farm water says such transfers can deplete more water than the paper shows, so the river can lose more than the ledger does. ⁴³

Twenty years from now, in 2046, no forecast is worth much, so take two bounds. If the region's data center load only doubles again after 2036, which is slower than the 22 percent a year Berkeley Lab projects for the country through 2030, the interior West carries about 52 gigawatts and roughly 31,000 to 276,000 acre feet a year. ⁸ If everything announced gets built, it carries about 65 gigawatts and roughly 39,000 to 345,000 acre feet, the water of up to about a million homes. And the bathtub keeps draining the whole time. The river has already lost 19 percent of its flow, a third of it to heat that does not come back; the basin has to give up 13 to 20 percent of what it uses today just to stop the tub from emptying; the Great Salt Lake needs 770,000 to a million acre feet a year that its rivers do not have. ^{32 31 36}

Here is the picture at the end of that road. The mountains fill the tank to half. The states divide a river that delivers three quarters of what the paper assumed and drain the savings to cover the difference until the savings run out. Farms that fed the valley go quiet, first the ones whose owners took the offer, then the ones whose water the county needed for the campus's power plant. The lake keeps dropping and the dust from its bed blows into the cities. And in the middle of it, running day and night, sit buildings that use the water of a mid sized city, whose owners bought the right to it from the ledger before anyone else knew it was for sale. Next to a river that must give up two or three million acre feet, a few hundred thousand for data centers sounds small. It is not small where it is taken from. The Colorado's shortage is spread over seven states and forty million people. A data center's water comes out of one valley, from named farms and named towns, for as long as the machines run, under contracts nobody outside the deal has read. Twenty years is not even one generation. The rule I started with asks about seven.

Two honest cautions. If every data center and every power plant is cooled with fans, the low end of every range above holds, and the water problem is real but manageable. Nothing in any Utah approval requires that. And for campuses that buy power from the grid, the second straw drinks wherever the utility's plants sit, not at the site. For the Utah campuses that make their own power, the plant and the site are the same place.

The Damage That Does Not Come Back

Some of this damage can be undone and some cannot. When a basin is pumped below the lowest level it has ever reached, the clay layers in the ground settle. The U.S. Geological Survey explains it with dinner plates. Clay grains start out like plates tossed in a sink, with room for water between them. Pump the water out and they end up like plates stacked in a cupboard, with far less room left. Refilling the basin does not unstack them. The Survey says most of this compaction is irreversible, and that subsidence occurring today is “a legacy for all tomorrows.” ⁷³ That is the risk in any closed basin where a campus or its power plant runs on wells.

The West has already run the other test. Los Angeles began taking the Owens River in 1913, and most of the lake at the bottom of the valley dried up. The dry bed became the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States. Los Angeles has now spent more than $2.5 billion holding that dust down, and it uses about 60,000 acre feet of water a year to do it. ⁷⁴ A city took a valley’s water more than a century ago, and its great grandchildren are still paying to keep the lakebed from blowing away. The Great Salt Lake is also a salt lake with no outlet, and it stands more than eight feet below what the state calls healthy. ³⁶

A tax break runs out and a lease ends. A flattened aquifer and a dry lakebed are still there for the seventh generation.

Who pays

Follow the money and it runs backward. Utah exempts qualifying data centers from sales tax on their machines, ⁵⁷ and the Tax Commission cannot say what that costs because the Legislature in 2009 stopped requiring businesses to report tax free purchases. ⁵⁸ Good Jobs First, which tracks these deals, lists Utah among fourteen states that disclose their data center tax losses nowhere. Where states do count, Georgia is giving up $2.5 billion a year, Virginia $1.94 billion and Texas $1 billion, and the three states that have measured what they get back find they lose 52 to 91 cents on every dollar. ⁵⁹ Utah's credit to Creekstone is for 106 jobs against $17 billion of promised investment, about $161 million of promised investment per job. ⁶ The 13,000 acre solar lease on school trust land is the largest in state history, and the announcement does not say what the rent is. ⁴ The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates data centers will add $886 to $978 billion to the nation's wholesale electricity bill between 2026 and 2050, 18 percent of the whole thing, and that could land on everyone's power bill unless someone stops it. ⁶⁰ On September 16 the House of Representatives voted 417 to 3 for a bill that has state regulators consider making the largest data centers pay for the grid upgrades they require, which tells you the worry is not partisan and not imaginary. ⁶¹ And Utah just paid 90 percent of a nearly $28 million rebuild of the dam that stores the Sevier River. ⁶² The public rebuilt the tank. The public is now asked to watch what it holds be sold to the highest bidder, with the state's economic development office holding the door.

Jefferson’s conclusion was that no generation may run up debts it cannot pay in its own lifetime. ⁷¹ A thirty year tax break binds people who are in grade school today. So does moving a valley’s water from its farms to a power plant.

Who decides

The most telling number in all of this comes from Virginia, where 25 of the 31 local governments with an existing, approved or proposed data center had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the developer, agreements that a planning journal found in September routinely hide water and power demand from the public. ⁶³ The Federation of American Scientists reviewed 42 local ordinances and ten signed agreements and concluded that data center development has outpaced most local governments' capacity to respond. ⁶⁴ Utah built a bypass: inside a project area the Military Installation Development Authority exercises exclusive police power as though it were a city, ⁸³ and its board approved the 40,000 acre Stratos project area on April 24, ten days before the county commission voted to join it. ⁸⁴ Millard County held eight public hearings on its campuses about data center projects, by a commissioner's count. ⁷ But a hearing on a project whose answer on water leans on a patent application is a hearing on a promise.

The state's new law, whose reporting duties began July 1, makes a data center that will take 75 acre feet or more tell the Division of Water Rights and report its use; the fine for not reporting is up to $100 a day. ⁶⁵ The governor's executive order tells state agencies to make sure data center water use is not increased, without saying who measures it. ⁶⁶ A July 2025 federal executive order treats any data center adding more than 100 megawatts as a qualifying project and tells the departments to offer federal land; the Energy Department has already picked out about 44,000 acres at the Idaho National Laboratory. ^{67 68} The people who own that land, all of us, were not asked. The people who will own it after us cannot be asked. Somebody has to ask for them.

People are answering anyway. Data Center Watch counted $18 billion of projects blocked and $46 billion delayed by local opposition over two years through early 2025, and then 75 projects worth about $130 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone, with organized groups in 49 states. ⁶⁹ Monterey Park, California banned data center construction at the ballot box in June with 86 percent of the vote. ⁶⁴ These are not people who hate technology. They are ranchers, retirees and county water masters who have read their own water reports and can do the arithmetic.

What a sane answer looks like

I am a lawyer, not a hydrologist, so I will stick to what the records support. First, no water, no permit. A county should not rezone and a state should not hand out a credit until the developer has filed, in public, the water rights or shares it has actually bought, the applications to move that water from farm to industry, and an engineer's count of both straws at full size, power plant included. A patent application is not a water plan. Second, count the second straw. Every closed loop claim should carry the power plant's water on the same page, because that is where the water goes. Third, no subsidy without disclosure. A state that cannot say what its data center tax break costs should not stack new ones on it, and leases of school trust land should be published before they are signed. Fourth, audit the ledgers. Before a water company's shares move to industry in a closed basin, an independent accountant should check that company's accounts, carryover balances and transfers, so the water being sold exists. Fifth, end the bypass. Project areas that take the biggest decisions in a county's history away from the county should go, and nondisclosure agreements about water and power should not bind a public body. Sixth, wait for the river. Until the Colorado River states have a deal past 2028 and the Great Salt Lake is above its minimum, no new giant load in the Great Basin or the Colorado system should be approved on a promise of water to be found later.

None of that stops a data center that has real water, real power and a real tenant. It stops the ones that have a rezone and a press release. It would have sent Stratos back for its water plan before nearly 3,900 protests had to be filed. It would have made Creekstone file its water plan before the county approved its project area.

Back in Delta, the river upstream is delivering a tenth of what the oldest rights on paper say it owes, ³⁵ and the farmers who hold the shares have been told the campuses next door will not exceed existing water rights, ⁷ and that a machine can make more from natural gas. ²⁷ The West has heard this before. The farmers of the Owens Valley thought the water was staying in their valley too. ⁸⁰ The last unspoiled places in the West are not empty. They are full of water rights that already belong to the people who live there, and the quiet transfer of those rights to the biggest companies on earth, with our tax money, through processes built to keep us from seeing it, is the most important land deal of our lifetime. We are allowed a say in it. We should insist on one before the ledger is rewritten.

Lawyers have a name for what happens when the person holding land for the next owner uses it up. It is called waste, and under Utah law the next owner can sue for it and a court may award three times the damage. ⁷² The next owners of this river have not been born, so they have no lawyer and no seat in the hearing room. The Seventh Generation rule gives them one. We know what happens without it, because we are living in it. The men who divided the Colorado River in 1922 signed for water that was never there, and their great grandchildren are the ones cutting back. A county that trades its water for a campus with no tenant is signing the same kind of paper. It is spending an inheritance that belongs to people who are too young to vote or are not here yet.

This is not a partisan issue. The land we inhabit will be inhabited by others, as it has been for thousands of years. It is not for out of state billionaires buying up Utah land, and mineral extraction rights on Utah’s school trust land, to decide now how to split up the last of Utah’s public lands. ^{75 76} The public lands in Utah are sacred to all of its people and it will take all of its people and a sustained effort to protect what is left and to take back what has been already taken by politicians and billionaires.

Bears Ears has been made a monument, cut, restored and cut again in less than ten years, each time by one signature. ⁷⁸ A valley’s water can go the same way, on a rezoning vote and a lease. Nobody is coming to do this for us. The work of keeping this state for the ones who come after has fallen on its citizens, and the time to act is now. Whatever else we argue about, we all love this state, its canyons and rivers and what people left in them over thousands of years. There is nothing left to squander.

James H. Tily is an attorney in Salt Lake City. He represents a client in a pending Millard County matter involving water share accounting. This essay does not draw on or discuss that matter.

He used AI to research and fact-check this essay.

Sources

1. Utah Division of Water Rights, water rights policy for Area 66 (Sevier River basin surface water closed to new appropriation by proclamation of December 19, 1946; groundwater closed March 19, 1997): https://www.waterrights.utah.gov/wrinfo/policy/wrareas/area66.asp; Area 68, which covers Delta and states the same closures: https://www.waterrights.utah.gov/wrinfo/policy/wrareas/area68.asp
2. Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General, Report 2023-13, A Performance Audit of the Intermountain Power Agency (IPA purchased 27 percent of the shares of the five regional water companies; owns a combined annual average of 45,000 acre feet; unused water historically leased to local farmers): https://le.utah.gov/interim/2023/pdf/00004334.pdf
3. Sevier River Water Users Association, system description (1938 agreement; shareholders allowed to hold over unused annual allotments): http://www.sevierriver.org/about/system-description/
4. Creekstone Energy, Business Wire release, March 10, 2026 (13,000 acre TLA solar lease, largest in Utah's history; campus of more than 1,100 acres master planned for more than 10 gigawatts): https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260310800142/en/; ABC4, January 22, 2026 (June 3, 2025 rezone of over 1,100 acres; Joule groundbreaking held in November 2025): https://www.abc4.com/news/central-utah/millard-county-solar-project-ai-centers-public-opposition/
5. Deseret News, October 21, 2025 (Joule campus; 1.3 gigawatts of on site power in the first phase): https://www.deseret.com/utah/2025/10/21/millard-county-data-center-to-break-ground-and-bring-promise-to-rural-utah/
6. Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, April 9, 2026 (REDTIF post performance 50 percent tax credit; 106 jobs; $17 billion): https://business.utah.gov/tax-credits/creekstone-energy-llc-commits-17-billion-to-millard-county-data-center-project/
7. KUTV, June 3, 2026 (Commissioner Bill Wright: eight public hearings; projects will not exceed existing water rights): https://kutv.com/news/local/screaming-into-the-void-over-two-data-centers-in-central-utah
8. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (176 TWh and 4.4 percent in 2023; direct water 66 billion liters, 84 percent hyperscale and colocation; hyperscale 60 to 124 billion liters in 2028; indirect water nearly 800 billion liters): https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/lbnl-2024-united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report_1.pdf; 2025 Update (192 TWh and 4.7 percent in 2024; reference case 649 TWh and 11.8 percent in 2030): https://www.energy.gov/documents/united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report-2025-update
9. EPRI, Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary (9 to 17 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030, from 4 to 5 percent; seven additional states could exceed a 20 percent share): https://powering-intelligence.epri.com/executive-summary.html
10. International Energy Agency, Energy and AI, executive summary (data centers nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth to 2030; more electricity for data centers than all energy intensive goods combined): https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary
11. dcmap.us, US Data Center Pipeline, updated August 2026 (318.6 GW planned or under construction; 90.4 GW under construction; Texas 85.4 GW; Utah 18.7 GW, 27 records; New Mexico 10.7 GW; Arizona 10.4 GW; Stratos 9 GW planned; Joule 4 GW under construction; Project Jupiter 2.5 GW under construction): https://dcmap.us/insights/pipeline/; Utah page (Fibernet MercuryDelta campus, 2,000 MW): https://dcmap.us/states/utah/
12. Bloomberg, May 8, 2025, AI Is Draining Water From Areas That Need It Most (two thirds of new data centers since 2022 in high water stress areas; more than 160 new AI data centers in such areas in three years, a 70 percent increase): https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
13. Macknick, Newmark, Heath and Hallett, Operational water consumption and withdrawal factors for electricity generating technologies, Environmental Research Letters 7 (2012), Table 2 (natural gas combined cycle, cooling tower, median 205 gallons per MWh; coal, tower, 687; combined cycle, dry, 2): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045802
14. Meta, 2025 Environmental Data Index (2024 total water consumption 3,123 megaliters, of which data centers 2,974; embedded water in purchased electricity 72,207 megaliters; annual data center WUE 0.19): https://sustainability.atmeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Meta_2025-Environmental-Data-Index.pdf
15. Siddik, Shehabi and Marston, The environmental footprint of data centers in the United States, Environmental Research Letters 16 (2021) (West and Southwest supply 20 percent of direct and 30 percent of indirect water and host about 20 percent of servers, yet 70 percent of the water scarcity footprint): https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
16. The Oregonian, December 17, 2022 (13 month records fight; Google paid more than $100,000; use up threefold since 2017; 355 million gallons, 29 percent of city consumption in 2021): https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-water-use-is-soaring-in-the-dalles-records-show-with-two-more-data-centers-to-come.html; The Oregonian, April 6, 2026 (nearly 550 million gallons in 2025, nearly 40 percent; peak allowance still redacted): https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/04/more-oregon-water-for-googles-data-centers-more-concern-over-secrecy.html
17. Google, 2026 Environmental Report (10.9 billion gallons consumed across data centers and offices in 2025): https://sustainability.google/files/google-2026-environmental-report.pdf
18. Utah Governor's Office, FAQ on Stratos Project (40,000 acre project area; water right change application received March 25 and withdrawn May 6; applicant intends to refile): https://governor.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/FAQ-on-Stratos-Project.pdf; Utah News Dispatch via Western Water, May 8, 2026 (1,900 acre feet; nearly 3,900 protests): https://www.western-water.com/2026/05/08/utah-data-center-water-fight-intensifies/
19. Snopes, June 6, 2026, reporting Utah Clean Energy's estimate (2 billion to 16.6 billion gallons a year depending on generation): https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/06/07/utah-data-center-water-manhattan/ (16.6 billion gallons is 50,944 acre feet at 325,851 gallons per acre foot)
20. Desert Research Institute, Data Centers in Nevada (medium efficiency scenario: about 9,647 acre feet per year for cooling and 12,448 for electricity generation after buildout to 2033): https://www.dri.edu/datacenters/
21. The Arizona Republic, July 2, 2019 (Google Mesa capped at 4,480 acre feet a year, enough for about 13,440 households; Microsoft Goodyear expected to use 5,600): https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands/2019/07/02/google-microsoft-data-centers-use-ton-water-really-smart-arizona/1629401001/
22. Albuquerque Journal (reports that the state engineer's general counsel told the Santa Fe New Mexican the gas plants would need nearly a million gallons a day; the Journal could not verify the estimate): https://www.abqjournal.com/news/doa-ana-county-seeks-answers-on-project-jupiter-water-use/3022316; Doña Ana County, September 19, 2025 approval: https://www.donaana.gov/news_detail_T7_R35.php
23. Microsoft, December 9, 2024 (zero water evaporated for cooling design; avoids more than 125 million liters per year per datacenter): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12/09/sustainable-by-design-next-generation-datacenters-consume-zero-water-for-cooling/
24. Amazon, Water stewardship (0.12 liters per kilowatt hour average WUE for AWS data centers): https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/natural-resources/water
25. Millard County Planning Commission minutes, June 25, 2025 (26 buildings; 1 to 1.5 acre feet per building): https://millardcounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/062525-FINAL-minutes.pdf
26. arXiv 2609.25437 (September 2026) (air cooled data centers halve total water consumption relative to evaporative cooling but raise electricity demand and indirect water consumption by one third): https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25437
27. Fox 13, September 9, 2026 (about 4,000 acre feet per year if two gigawatts were generated with natural gas; University of Utah to assess): https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/central-utah/could-new-technology-actually-create-water-at-massive-millard-county-data-center; Utah News Dispatch, September 9, 2026: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/09/09/delta-data-center-developer-tech-to-turn-natural-gas-into-water/
28. Bureau of Reclamation, August 21, 2026 release (record lows; lowest combined contents since 1963; Lower Basin reductions of 1.25 million acre feet in each of the next two years): https://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/news-release/5392; Record of Decision (the seven Basin States were unable to reach an agreement): https://www.usbr.gov/ColoradoRiverBasin/post2026/decision-doc/P26_RecordofDecision_Final.pdf; August 2026 24-Month Study (WY2026 unregulated inflow 3.58 maf, 37 percent of average; April to July 1.14 maf, 18 percent): https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/studies/24Month_08_6.pdf
29. Congressional Research Service, R45546, Management of the Colorado River, updated May 19, 2026 (Compact assumed 16.4 maf; 14.6 maf 1906 to 2024; 12.43 maf 2000 to 2024; consumptive use 13.3 maf in 2024 against flows averaging 11.9 maf; structural deficit): https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45546
30. Richter et al., Communications Earth and Environment (2024) (river overconsumed in 16 of 21 years, 2000 to 2020): https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01291-0
31. Schmidt, Yackulic and Kuhn, The Colorado River water crisis, WIREs Water (2023) (13 to 20 percent decline in basin wide use needed for stabilization): https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1672
32. Udall and Overpeck, Water Resources Research (2017) (2000 to 2014 flows 19 percent below the 1906 to 1999 average; one sixth to one half, average one third, due to unprecedented temperatures): https://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019638
33. Utah Division of Water Resources, snowpack (lowest on record; peak March 9 at 8.4 inches, about half of normal): https://water.utah.gov/snowpack/
34. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, April 21, 2026 (April 1, 2026 snowpack at or near record lows throughout the western United States): https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/state-offices/colorado/news/record-low-april-1-snowpack-across-western-us-means-impending-water
35. Utah Division of Water Resources, drought update, September 17, 2026 (reservoir storage 50 percent; Upper Sevier natural flow about 10 percent of first class direct flow rights): https://water.utah.gov/drought-update-fall-irrigation-soil-moisture-and-statewide-reservoir-conditions/
36. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Great Salt Lake water levels (4,189.6 feet as of September 30, 2026; a terminal lake with no outlet): https://wildlife.utah.gov/gslep/waterlevels; Utah Division of Water Resources, Great Salt Lake (record low of 4,188.5 feet in November 2022): https://water.utah.gov/great-salt-lake/; BYU, Great Salt Lake assessment (minimum healthy elevation of 4,198 feet; needs about a million acre feet a year more, to about 2.5 million; 30 to 50 percent consumption cut): https://pws.byu.edu/great-salt-lake; Great Salt Lake Strike Team, 2025 (770 KAF per year scenario): https://greatsaltlake.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/GSL-Data-and-Insights-2025.pdf
37. Utah Governor's proclamation, November 3, 2022: https://water.utah.gov/gov-cox-issues-proclamation-closing-great-salt-lake-basin-to-new-water-right-appropriations/
38. Arizona Department of Water Resources, Phoenix AMA groundwater supply updates (4.86 million acre feet of unmet demand over 100 years; no new groundwater based Assured Water Supply determinations): https://www.azwater.gov/phoenix-ama-groundwater-supply-updates
39. New Mexico 50-Year Water Action Plan (750,000 acre foot shortfall): https://www.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/New-Mexico-50-Year-WaterAction-Plan.pdf
40. NV Energy, 2026 Joint Integrated Resource Plan, Volume 7, load forecast (50 major projects requesting about 16,930 MW by 2036; 22 signed agreements requesting about 5,725 MW): https://www.nvenergy.com/publish/content/dam/nvenergy/brochures_arch/about-nvenergy/rates-regulatory/recent-regulatory-filings/2026-irp/NPC-SPPC-Volume-7.pdf
41. Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1877) (Illinois constitution of 1870, article XIII, duty to pass laws “to prevent the issue of false and fraudulent warehouse receipts”; warehouse act approved April 25, 1871): https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/94/113/; C. Peter Magrath, The Foot in the Door, American Heritage, February 1964 (bogus receipts not backed by grain; in 1872 Munn & Scott receipts for 300,000 bushels were not backed by grain): https://www.americanheritage.com/foot-door
42. The Guardian, April 5, 2018, Ghost water, poor planning and theft: how the Murray-Darling plan fell apart (standfirst: more than five years and $9bn since the basin plan began): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/05/ghost-water-poor-planning-and-theft-how-the-murray-darling-plan-fell-apart
43. Utah Division of Water Resources, Agricultural Water Optimization report (April 2026) (conversions from agriculture to M&I can result in increased depletion): https://water.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GSL-BIP_AgWaterOptimizationReport_FINAL_2026-04-21.pdf
44. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up 2025 Edition (roughly 2,290 GW actively seeking interconnection; 13 percent of 2000 to 2019 capacity reached operation by end of 2024; 77 percent withdrawn): https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/Queued%20Up%202025%20Edition%20-%2012.15.2025.pdf
45. Wood Mackenzie, press release, July 30, 2026 (331 GW disclosed; about 40 percent under active development; in Utah and New Mexico only a small fraction in active development): https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/us-data-centre-developers-shift-focus-to-existing-pipelines-as-new-capacity-additions-slow-in-q1-2026/
46. Data Center Dynamics, March 6, 2026 (Abilene expansion canceled): https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/oracleopenai-drop-plans-to-expand-flagship-abilene-stargate-site-meta-in-talks-to-pick-up-crusoe-capacity-with-nvidias-help/
47. Office of the Texas Governor, August 3, 2026 (over 474 gigawatts of requests, more than five times record peak; about 90 percent data centers; connections paused pending audit): https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit
48. Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, Utah Data Center Growth fact sheet, April 2026 (48 operational data centers, over 920 MW; seven under construction adding 2,600 MW, 1,700 MW behind the meter): https://d36oiwf74r1rap.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Data-Center-Growth-FS-Apr2026.pdf
49. KSL, August 20, 2026 (governor calls MIDA process not good): https://www.ksl.com/article/51614434/cox-calls-for-major-reform-to-mida-after-data-center-pushback; Utah News Dispatch, September 9, 2026 (Stratos project area scaled back from 40,000 to 20,000 acres): https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/09/09/delta-data-center-developer-tech-to-turn-natural-gas-into-water/
50. Utahn.com, June 9, 2026, The Stratos Project Has Everything but Water, Money, and a Tenant (filings name no anchor tenants; June 4 commitment to cut the project area to about 20,000 acres): https://utahn.com/the-stratos-project-has-everything-but-water-money-and-a-tenant/
51. KSL, May 27, 2026 (Iron County 180 day moratorium; proposed Pronghorn data center on 640 acres): https://www.ksl.com/article/51503330/iron-county-presses-pause-on-new-ai-data-center-proposals-to-review-current-regulations
52. Nevada Current, August 20, 2026 (Nye County bans data centers in Basin 162; 900 acre Manse campus): https://nevadacurrent.com/2026/08/20/nye-county-totally-bans-data-centers-in-over-appropriated-water-basin/
53. Arizona Corporation Commission, April 20, 2026 (about two dozen data centers, more than 2,000 MW operating; more than 10,600 MW planned): https://www.azcc.gov/news/home/2026/04/20/acc-large-load-data-center-workshop-highlights
54. The Colorado Sun, August 18, 2025 (Xcel 6.2 GW of generating capacity; pending data center applications for 5.8 GW): https://coloradosun.com/2025/08/18/colorado-xcel-data-center-demand-spending/
55. Cowboy State Daily, July 8, 2026 (2.7 gigawatt Project Jade south of Cheyenne revealed as a Google campus): https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/07/08/google-revealed-as-owner-of-wyomings-largest-data-center-now-project-tembo/; POWER, January 2026 (2.7 GW of new gas generation approved): https://www.powermag.com/wyoming-approves-data-center-campus-that-includes-2-7-gw-of-new-natural-gas-fired-generation/
56. The Oregonian, March 27, 2026 (cities and counties working to open 9,100 acres; about 2,900 acres occupied; governor: not sustainable): https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/03/oregon-communities-envision-9100-acres-for-new-data-centers-quadrupling-the-industrys-footprint.html
57. Utah Code 59-12-104(84) (sales and use tax exemption for machinery, equipment and parts purchased or leased by a qualifying data center): https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title59/Chapter12/59-12-S104.html
58. Utah News Dispatch, reported at politicit.com (Tax Commission cannot estimate the exemption's cost; 2009 repeal of exempt transaction reporting): https://politicit.com/mystery-price-tag-utah-cant-say-how-much-its-losing-from-data-center-tax-break/
59. Good Jobs First, Data Center Tax Abatements (April 2026) (Utah among states that disclose nowhere; Georgia $2.5 billion, Virginia $1.94 billion, Texas $1 billion per year; 52 to 91 cents lost per dollar): https://goodjobsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Data-Center-Tax-Abatements-Why-States-and-Localities-Must-Disclose-These-Soaring-Revenue-Losses.pdf; Cloudy With a Loss of Spending Control (April 2025): https://goodjobsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Cloudy-with-a-Loss-of-Spending-Control-How-Data-Centers-Are-Endangering-State-Budgets.pdf
60. Union of Concerned Scientists, Data Center Power Play (2026) ($886 billion to $978 billion, 18 percent of U.S. wholesale electricity costs, 2026 to 2050): https://wjla.com/resources/pdf/64359c4f-5cc4-4908-a9ce-44450744d976-DataCenterPowerPlayreportfinal.pdf
61. Deseret News, September 16, 2026 (House vote 417 to 3): https://www.deseret.com/politics/2026/09/16/house-votes-shield-taxpayers-from-data-center-costs/
62. Deseret News, December 5, 2025 (Sevier Bridge Dam project nearly $28 million; 90 percent paid by the state): https://www.deseret.com/utah/2025/12/05/utah-dam-reconstruction-wins-national-award/
63. AI Now Institute, local data center toolkit (25 of 31 Virginia localities with an existing, approved or proposed data center had an NDA): https://datacenters.ainowinstitute.org/local/; Kollar and Danielak, Planning Conflict in the Age of AI Infrastructure, Journal of the American Planning Association (September 8, 2026): https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2026.2720635
64. Federation of American Scientists, Before Breaking Ground (September 2026) (development has outpaced most local governments' capacity; Monterey Park Measure NDC, June 2, 2026, 86 percent): https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Before-Breaking-Ground.pdf
65. Utah Division of Water Rights, Data Center Water Use Reporting (effective July 1, 2026; 75 acre feet threshold): https://waterrights.utah.gov/data-centers/; H.B. 76 (2026), enrolled (duties begin on and after July 1, 2026; fine of up to $100 per day): https://le.utah.gov/Session/2026/bills/enrolled/HB0076.pdf
66. Utah Executive Order 2026-03 (ensure that water consumption is not increased): https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28174198/gov-cox-executive-order-on-higher-bar-for-data-center-development.pdf
67. Executive Order 14318, July 23, 2025, 90 Fed. Reg. 35385 (qualifying projects include incremental load greater than 100 MW): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-07-28/html/2025-14212.htm
68. U.S. Department of Energy, Idaho National Laboratory request for applications (approximately 44,000 acres identified): https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/energy-department-seeks-proposals-ai-data-centers-energy-projects-idaho-national
69. Data Center Watch, 2025 report ($18 billion blocked, $46 billion delayed): https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report; Q1 2026 report (at least 75 projects, about $130 billion; groups in 49 states): https://www.datacenterwatch.org/q1-2026
70. Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Values (the Seventh Generation value; chiefs consider how present day decisions will impact their descendants; nations are taught they are borrowing the world from future generations): https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/values/; Who We Are (called the Iroquois Confederacy by the French): https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are/; The League of Nations (the Tuscarora joined as the sixth nation): https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/the-league-of-nations/
71. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, Founders Online, National Archives (“the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”; “eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come”; no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence): https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0375-0003
72. Utah Code 78B-6-1001 (a tenant for life who commits waste on real property may be sued by any person aggrieved; judgment may include treble damages): https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title78B/Chapter6/78B-6-S1001.html
73. U.S. Geological Survey, Aquifer Compaction due to Groundwater Pumping (clay grains rearranged like stacked plates; most compaction from historically low groundwater levels is irreversible; “subsidence occurring today is a legacy for all tomorrows”): https://www.usgs.gov/centers/land-subsidence-in-california/science/aquifer-compaction-due-groundwater-pumping
74. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Owens Lake (more than $2.5 billion spent on dust control; about 60,000 acre feet of water a year): https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/los-angeles-aqueduct/owens-lake; LADWP, Notice of Preparation, Owens Lake Revised Moat and Row Dust Control Measures (before 2000 the dried lake bed was the largest single source of PM10 emissions in the United States): https://www.ladwp.com/sites/default/files/documents/Owens_Lake_Revised_Moat_Row_NOP.pdf; National Academies, Effectiveness and Impacts of Dust Control Measures for Owens Lake (2020) (diversions began in 1913; lake shrank to less than one third of its former area): https://gbuapcd.org/OwensLake/OLSAP/Owens%20Lake_Prepublication_%2026%20Feb%202020%20-%20Embargo%20--%20for%20email.pdf
75. KPCW, September 7, 2023 (billionaire Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, is majority owner of Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah): https://www.kpcw.org/ski-resorts/2023-09-07/netflix-co-founder-investing-100-million-into-powder-mountain
76. Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, Board of Trustees packet, February 20, 2025 (two new oil and gas leases to Anschutz Exploration Corporation of Denver on 920 acres of trust lands in Uintah County; ten leases extended on 4,730.33 acres): https://www.utah.gov/pmn/files/1236053.pdf; board minutes recording unanimous approval: https://www.utah.gov/pmn/files/1250111.pdf; Denver Post, October 21, 2010 (Anschutz Exploration, “owned by Philip Anschutz”): https://www.denverpost.com/2010/10/21/anschutz-exploration-makes-3-billion-shale-oil-sale/; Forbes, Philip Anschutz profile (net worth $19.3 billion; fortunes in oil): https://www.forbes.com/profile/philip-anschutz/
77. Proclamation 9558 of December 28, 2016, Establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument, 82 Fed. Reg. 1139 (twin buttes named Bears Ears in each native language of the region; native peoples lived there for hundreds of generations; rock art at least 5,000 years old; “one of the most intact and least roaded areas in the contiguous United States”; “For thousands of years, humans have occupied and stewarded this land”; Navajo term for places to be left alone): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-01-05/html/2017-00038.htm
78. Proclamation 11043 of July 13, 2026, Modifying the Bears Ears National Monument, Federal Register, July 17, 2026 (recounts the 2016, 2017 and 2021 proclamations; reduces the monument from approximately 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,096 acres; cites critical minerals including silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium and zinc; the 91 percent figure is the author’s arithmetic): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/17/2026-14548/modifying-the-bears-ears-national-monument
79. Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, A Collaborative Land Management Plan for the Bears Ears National Monument (Hopi, Navajo, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni; “Native peoples with ancestral ties to this region are eternally obligated by their beliefs to serve as stewards of the land”): https://bearsearscoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/FINAL_BENM_LMP_04132023.pdf
80. William L. Kahrl, Part I: The Politics of California Water: Owens Valley and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1900-1927, 6 Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 239 (2000), at 240 to 245 (Eaton a former mayor; 1905 options on water rights for transfer to the city; Reclamation Service maps and credentials; “unsuspecting farmers who thought they were aiding reclamation for the valley”; secrecy until the Los Angeles Times story of July 29, 1905; aqueduct completed in 1913): https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1411&context=hastings_environmental_law_journal; Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Los Angeles Aqueduct facts and history: https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/los-angeles-aqueduct/facts-history
81. KSL, October 1, 2026 (Stratos developer: “The project is not on hold”; revised water application expected that week; “under 900,000 gallons of water a day on average after recycling” at full buildout; the acre foot figure is the author’s arithmetic): https://www.ksl.com/article/51630804/box-elder-county-data-center-plans-quietly-edging-ahead-though-debate-has-died-down
82. KSL, August 14, 2025 (Creekstone agreement with BluSky AI for 25 acres and up to 50 megawatts; planned supply of 1.8 gigawatts from the Intermountain Power Project, 6 from solar and 2 from natural gas): https://www.ksl.com/article/news/utah/science-and-tech/worlds-largest-data-center-campus-could-be-coming-to-central-utah/51355852
83. Utah Code 63H-1-201(3)(i) (the authority may “exercise exclusive police power within a project area to the same extent as though the authority were a municipality”): https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title63H/Chapter1/63H-1-S201.html
84. Deseret News, April 24, 2026 (authority board approves the Stratos proposal, 40,000 acres): https://www.deseret.com/business/2026/04/24/shark-tank-kevin-oleary-data-center-energy-development-utah-ai-artificial-intelligence/; ABC4, May 9, 2026 (Box Elder County Commission approval on May 4): https://www.abc4.com/news/northern-utah/next-steps-stratos-project-data-center-box-elder/
85. University of Nevada, Reno Extension, Western Water Law: Understanding the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation (“paper water” is the legal claim to an allocation; “paper water isn’t wet water”): https://naes.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=3750
86. Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute, Wex, usufruct (“the right to use and benefit from a property, while the ownership of which belongs to another person”; no damage to or diminution of the property): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/usufruct
87. KSL, September 9, 2026 (Creekstone “is entirely funding the U.’s research”; the technology is “conceptual only”; the research is to determine “what would be needed to take it to commercial-scale performance”): https://www.ksl.com/article/51621116/creekstone-energy-university-of-utah-studying-feasibility-of-novel-water-generation-technology