I live in Oregon, a few miles from what people here call Data Center Row, and I have spent three decades with the kind of infrastructure Utah just approved in Hansel Valley.

I am not writing to tell Utah to stop. I am writing because I have watched where this road ends, and Utah still has time to choose a different one.

In Morrow County, Oregon, a county commissioner began collecting water samples from residents’ wells in 2022 after hearing too many accounts of unexplained illness. A Rolling Stone investigation later linked a rise in miscarriages and kidney disease to nitrate contamination in the Lower Umatilla Basin aquifer, the only drinking water source for 45,000 people, strained by data center operations drawing from and returning to the same system. In The Dalles, Google’s water use grew so large the city went to court to keep its consumption secret.

That is what it looks like when the infrastructure goes in faster than the rules meant to govern it.

Utah’s version has a different name and a far bigger footprint. The Stratos campus the Box Elder County Commission approved on May 4 would cover 40,000 acres and draw 9 gigawatts at full build, more than double what the entire state consumes today, fed by natural gas plants built on site. Utah State physicist Robert Davies calculates it would push roughly 16 gigawatts of heat into a desert bowl every day, a load he likens to 23 atomic bombs, in a region already fighting a shrinking Great Salt Lake, worsening dust and a water system stretched thin. The approval ran through the Military Installation Development Authority, an appointed board that granted an 80% property tax cut and dropped the energy tax from a statutory 6% to half a percent, outside the ordinary zoning most Utah projects must clear.

The problem is not data centers. The computing inside them runs hospitals, banks, classrooms and the power grid itself, and Utah has every reason to want a real share of the AI economy. The problem is how this particular project is sited, powered and governed, and those are choices Utah can make differently without surrendering either its ambition or its lake.

A smarter path exists, and it is not theoretical. Germany now requires new data centers to recover their waste heat on a rising schedule, and operators elsewhere already cool their facilities with little or no water.

Instead of one enormous campus in close to the worst possible spot for trapping heat, Utah could host the same computing distributed across Silicon Slopes and its existing cities, sized to the grid the state already has, with the heat captured to warm buildings and the water use closed off rather than drawn from the ground. That model spreads thousands of jobs across Utah instead of concentrating a few hundred permanent positions on 40,000 rural acres, broadens the tax base instead of giving most of it away and puts no single irreplaceable watershed at risk. The technology is proven. What is missing is the requirement to use it.

Utahns are organizing a referendum to revisit the approval. Whatever its outcome, the deeper question is the one Oregon answered too late: What will Utah require of the infrastructure it is about to build, before the concrete sets and the choices harden into something permanent?

Get the requirements right and Utah can lead the AI era and keep the Great Salt Lake. Get them wrong and you inherit my state’s lesson, written in well water and court filings.

Utah will be telling the story of what it built here for a generation. It still gets to decide whether it tells that story with pride or with regret.

Josh Smith is a data center and infrastructure technologist spanning three decades, including former data center operational responsibility. He lives near Hillsboro, Oregon, beside the state’s “Data Center Row,” and recently wrote about data center energy waste for the Seattle Times. Disclosure: he works in the data systems industry, the sector this commentary argues should be regulated more rigorously.

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