Uinta County, Wyoming, commissioners unanimously voted to permit an artificial intelligence data center Tuesday.
The Uinta County Herald reports the Prometheus Hyperscale approval followed public pushback in packed town hall meetings — not unlike recent data center hearings in Box Elder County, Utah.
Southwestern Wyomingites had questions about the data center’s environmental impact.
At roughly 12 miles east of Evanston, on the south side of Interstate 80, it will be the closest data center to Summit County, Utah. Prometheus says construction will begin within six months of “final permitting” and take four to five years.
However, its footprint will be 20 times smaller than Box Elder’s 9-gigawatt data center planned for 10,000 acres near the Great Salt Lake.
Prometheus calls the Evanston data center its “flagship project.”
The company says it’s located on 506 acres that founder Trenton Thornock's family has ranched for six generations.
The data center will run on 1.25 gigawatts, more electricity than all the homes in Wyoming use.
Speaking with Wyoming Public Media last November, Thornock pitched it as a green data center amid fields of wind and solar. But he said most of its power will come from natural gas, a readily available and relatively clean fossil fuel.
Thornock eventually wants to tap nuclear energy too.
A private, on-site well will supply the data center’s plumbing, but Prometheus says it will cool the servers with a water-glycol mixture that lasts six years before it must be changed out.
Eric Schlidt, the director of Prometheus’ Build Wyoming initiative, told KPCW the coolant mixture will be trucked in.
That means the data center won’t draw on groundwater or surface water for cooling — and Schlidt said it won’t use water from the nearby Bear River, which feeds the Great Salt Lake.
Downstream in Box Elder County, it’s unclear where celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary will source the water to cool his own data center. Two of its water rights applications have been withdrawn amid concerns it will deplete the Great Salt Lake more quickly.
KUER reports local communities across Utah are scrambling to draft data center regulations after the public outcry in Box Elder.
The development code in eastern Summit County, where much of the Great Salt Lake’s water originates, does not address data centers. Planners have discussed including guidelines in the eastside’s next general plan document.
According to Summit County Councilmember Chris Robinson, the Utah Association of Counties is training local officials on how to handle data center proposals.
Still, he thinks Summit County’s bumpy topography and expensive land won’t make it easy to build large computing campuses.
“I’m no expert, but I guess if you can do one in Evanston, or Uinta, you could do it in our county,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” June 18.
Thornock’s company, Prometheus Hyperscale, is a different company than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ startup Prometheus AI.
Prometheus Hyperscale has another data center planned in central Wyoming, and another in Texas. The Cowboy State Daily reports they are planned to be similarly “water-efficient.”
