A rural county at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. A multimillionaire celebrity businessman. A shadowy state agency. What Box Elder County, Utah’s fight over a 40,000-acre data center reveals about America’s AI future.

Guests

Leia Larsen, water and land use reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune.

Vijay Gadepally, senior scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Co-founder of Radium, a cloud computing company. Co-founder of Bay Compute, a company primarily focused on data center energy reduction.

Also Featured

Brenna and Tameron Williams, residents of Box Elder County, Utah.

Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan, senior partners at Elevate Strategies, a political consulting firm in Utah that works to elect Democrats.

Greg Pirio, resident of Sterling, Virginia who lives near a data center.

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This program aired on May 20, 2026.