“It's just really different from any kind of other big development projects because not only are people acutely aware of the costs, but there's no pros. It's not like people are excited for jobs.”

Yeah, it's a really interesting case with Stratus where all of the conversations until very late are happening at the developer and state level. And in this case, they literally forgot or failed or for some reason did not tell the county government that this was happening until very late. Whose consent they needed. And so that happens in late March. The county commissioners start hearing rumors that, like, apparently there's a data center coming. They have no idea. They ask around. The state says, We're sorry, I forgot to tell you, essentially, but we really need your approval fast. The county commissioners then have a meeting in late April, and that's when word starts to trickle out. And then MIDA votes to approve it two days later. And then kind of over that weekend in late April, you've now had two public meetings. There's local coverage. People start talking about it, saying, Oh, did you hear about the data center? You know, several people found out about it, you know, at the coffee shop, at the grocery store. They just hear about it. They see on Facebook. They're like, oh, there's a big data center coming. For some reason, the shark tank guy is involved. And that starts to kind of trickle out late April when you start to see that conversation happen. No one was happy about it. Everyone, you know, one of the interesting things about data centers right now is social media is so full of data center backlash stories. People hear data center, they like know broadly what's coming, some of which is exaggerated, some of which isn't, but like you don't need to get people up to speed that they realize, oh my God, this huge project is supposed to be, you know, they're saying it's nine gigawatts and it's coming to your metaphorical backyard.

This is the big difference in my mind between the Foxconn reporting and the Stratus reporting you did. So many people in Wisconsin were excited about the promise of a giant illusory L C D manufacturing plant that they ignored the very obvious fakery. And in the course of that reporting, you would literally go to empty buildings and point out that they were empty. And Foxcunt would issue statements saying they were not empty. And it was all just built on people's hope, right? It was an ink block test about whether manufacturing could come back to the Midwest. And so many people wanted to believe that that they ignored the obvious realities. In this case, if they had let Kevin O'Leary's AI a data center, it seems very likely that he would have built a data center. But the people there did not want that. It was the very opposite. All of the hopes and dreams were replaced by people's anger and fear about AI and maybe what they'd heard on social media. How did that play out in this story? Because that feels like a massive point of departure.

You talked to a lot of the protesters, the people who succeeded in having this project scale down pretty dramatically. Who are these characters? What are they like?

There's a wide range of people. I got some, one of the records that I thought was really fascinating that I got came from kind of a state intelligence fusion center thing talking to the sheriff saying, you know, just heads up, it's in theory, a very combustible group of people who's going to be attending one of these rallies. You have, you know, conservative groups with names like Utah Patriot Alliance or something like that, and the sort of water preservation like. Salt Lake activists. Normally, these groups just counter-protest each other, but here they've all come together for the same purpose, that they hate this data center. And so you have just like a very wide spread of people, even within one of the key activist group. It's a lot of people who weren't activists before, just local people, some conservative, some progressive, people with environmental concerns, people who are just upset about it. A lot of people upset about the process, feeling cut out, like this is something that has really offensive to them that this happened in their county with their county government, and that they weren't told, they weren't brought into it. They had no say. I think that galvanized a lot of people. The people I spoke to, they're mostly residents of the county or sometimes nearby counties, but everyone who was kind of most involved was a resident of the immediate area in Box Elder, not necessarily Hansel Valley, the remote region where the center would be based.

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