One day last year, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was sitting in his office on what he thought was just another ordinary day full of meetings, listening to a company talk about building a data center.
“Great,” he told them. “We do a lot of them.”
But then the company told Cox they’d need 1.4 gigawatts of power.
“I said, ‘Excuse me? That’s, that can’t be right, right?’” Cox said he told them. “The entire state of Utah runs on 4 gigawatts of power. I mean, I think Wyoming runs on about a gig or something like that. Like one campus needs that? That’s crazy.”
Cox had always known the energy demand curve was going to go up. But it wasn’t until that moment he realized he’d been vastly underestimating just how much.
Cox told the story to a group of business leaders at the Wyoming Business Alliance’s Annual Governor’s Conference on Wednesday in Laramie. His comments were part of a broader panel with Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and Region 8 EPA Administrator Cyrus Western that looked at what the West is doing to wrestle with both the challenge and the opportunity that Artificial Intelligence and data centers present.
“What’s happening in energy is unlike anything that’s happened in my lifetime,” Cox said. “The puck moved very quickly, and not many people really saw it coming. We knew the demand curve was going up. We knew with electric vehicles and the kind of electrification of everything that was happening out there that we were going to see an increase.
“But nobody, at least nobody I’ve talked to, saw the hyperscalers coming the way they did with AI,” Cox continued. “With the rise in demand that we’ve seen over the past year and a half.”
It was after that meeting with the data center that wanted more power than the entire state of Wyoming uses that Cox realized his game plan had to change.
“I launched what we call Operation Gigawatt, which is our effort to double our energy production over the next couple of years. And we probably need to triple that now,” Cox said. “But … what’s incredible about this moment, and the governors who get this, the states that lean in, are going to win here in a really big way.”
That’s because data centers right now are being built by some of the wealthiest companies on the planet, Cox said, and they don’t care how much it will cost. The only thing they care about is how fast it can be done.
Rising Opposition To AI, Data Centers
The power-hungry nature of data centers has many people in both Wyoming and Utah worried, Cox acknowledged.
Chief among the fears is that their outsized demand for power can’t help but drive-up utility costs for regular Americans, many of whom are already struggling to afford necessities like food and shelter amid soaring inflation.
Former state senator Anthony Bouchard channeled many of the fears and frustrations in Wyoming in October with a Facebook post that quickly attracted hundreds of angry comments.
“The new Casper AI center has the same electricity demand as a million homes,” Bouchard wrote in the post. “There are two similar AI centers already being built in Cheyenne. Now another is being built. There’s another one in Evanston … they will OWN all Wyoming Electric Companies.
“This is an electricity demand of 5 million homes for outside interests building these data centers – in a state that only has 280,000 homes,” Bouchard continued in the post. “Residential consumers will quickly become second fiddle.”
Wyoming has already had up to 12.8 new gigawatts of computing power announced this year, not including expansion plans announced by Microsoft or the new data center Meta is building in Cheyenne.
Wyoming isn’t alone in rising opposition. There’s a tidal wave of resistance rising in communities across America, with similar fears expressed, from high utility bills to over-consumption of water to cool data centers.
But there’s also widespread recognition that, at the end of the day, data and artificial intelligence centers are not going to go away.
“Everyone is using their phone so intensely,” Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, pointed out in an interview with Cowboy State Daily last month on the topic. “That’s a computer in your hand.”
But people aren’t making straight Google searches with their handheld computers anymore. They’re making artificial intelligence queries that can use as much as 10 times the power to complete to help them write grocery lists, plan upcoming meetings, respond to emails, and all the other things that an artificially intelligent personal assistant can do.
Is Left Starting To Adopt New Abundance Mindset?
Cox, who is this year’s chair of the Western Governors' Association, acknowledged that all these fears are about legitimate challenges. But he sees a way through it all. Not with a scarcity mindset though.
What he’s working on in Utah, and any Western states that choose to join him, is a concept called “superabundance.” In fact, he’s made it the key policy issue of his tenure as the WGA’s chair.
The idea comes from a couple of books Cox has read recently, one of which is a left-leaning book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein called “Abundance.”
“I do recommend it, even if you’re a conservative,” he said. “I think it’s important to understand what they’re trying to do, and basically their idea is … that our country stopped doing the things it was really good at. We were builders. That’s what we did. We built freeways, we built dams, we were able to produce energy. We did these big, audacious things and we did them quickly.”
Things like the Empire State Building, which went up in 13 months.
“That’s who we were,” Cox said. “And then, for lots of reasons, we just stopped doing that. And now we’ve made it impossible to do things in the physical world, which is making life worse for the people that we serve.”
Like transmission lines that seem to take an eternity to permit and build.
“We just got approved for a transmission line across Utah,” Cox said. “And we’re very happy about it. Excited to go. But the problem is that I started working on it when I was a county commissioner in 2009. It should not take 15 years to get approval for a transmission line that everybody knows we need, that everybody wants.”
The 15 years literally saved nothing, Cox added.
“We didn’t save one more tree or one more animal,” he said. “It was the exact same path that was originally proposed back in 2009. All we did was significantly increase the cost of it. So, this is the mentality we’ve gotten into and a lot of it was to protect the environment.”
Some of that was justified, Cox acknowledged.
“Surely we were not good at protecting the environment back in the 60s and 70s and earlier,” he said. “But we’ve now weaponized those tools, which were not meant to stop things from happening. We’ve weaponized them in such a way that it’s made it impossible to do even the things that the environmental community wants to do, right?”
The point of the “Abundance” book, Cox said is that the future doesn’t have to be written like a zero-sum game, where if one person wins, someone else must lose.
“These are false choices,” Cox said. “We shouldn’t have to make those choices. We can do big things and protect the environment. That’s an abundance mentality, not a scarcity mentality.”
Now Supersize It
Superabundance, meanwhile, comes from a book written prior to Klein and Thompson’s called, “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.”
The book was a response to a different book called “The Population Bomb,” written in 1968 by Paul R. Ehrlich, which speculated that the world is going to run out of everything because its population is growing too fast.
“We needed to stop having kids, and you’re a terrible human being if you bring another human being into this world,” Cox said. “We were just going to run out of food, we’re going to run out of water, we’re going to run out of the critical minerals that we need to make everything work.”
None of that, Cox added, has actually happened.
Amidst all the debate about the book, there was an economist named Gale Pooley who challenged Ehrlich to pick five commodities to track and just see whether anything like what Ehrlich had written about would actually happen.
“He said, ‘Let’s bet right now $1,000 that 10 years from now, we will look at the price of those commodities and if the price goes down, then you have to pay me the difference,’” Cox said. “‘And if the price goes up, I will pay you the difference.’”
Ten years later, after Pooley had forgotten all about the bet, he found a check in the mail. The economist had won the bet after all. All of the commodities were less expensive in inflation-adjusted dollars.
That inspired Pooley to write a book refuting “The Population Bomb.”
“He went back and looked at 100 different commodities,” Cox said. “He looked at all the important things that we need to live. And then he looked at their average price going back 25 years, and found that the vast majority of them, the price had gone down.”
What he decided from all that analysis is that human ingenuity is an “X” factor.
“The one thing (pessimists) never take into account is human ingenuity,” Cox said. “The ability of all of us to figure out how to do things better and more efficiently. That’s what makes us unique and different. That’s what superabundance is.”
It’s easy to come up with potential negatives and challenges, Cox said. It’s less easy to see how those problems will be solved, but what history has shown is that people do figure out a way, whenever there’s a will.
Wyoming Already Working To Innovate
Some of the problems with data centers are already getting solved by human ingenuity, Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, said.
Take water use. Some of the latest data centers announcing plans to build in Wyoming are planning water frugal designs that will recirculate and recycle water, or that will not use water at all for cooling.
“The latest data center in Cheyenne has six bathrooms,” Gordon said. “That’s it. That’s all the water they’re going to use. Everything else is enclosed.”
The next question Wyoming is working to answer relates to energy use. The big question that Wyoming is wrestling with is how to build out power for data centers and protect Wyoming consumers at the same time.
“How do you make sure that the energy supply can work in conjunction and close to where the consumption is,” he said. “And now suddenly you start thinking about … a regulatory structure where you have utilities routinely being downgraded at this point, because of their liability … So maybe that old structure really wasn’t the best, the most optimal.”
Wyoming is also exploring new alternatives for energy. There are firms looking at geothermal energy using old well bores, for example, not to mention TerraPower building a new nuclear plant in Kemmerer.
“Uranium is a huge part of our history,” Gordon said. “Coal, oil, gas, wind, solar. The question is, how do we put this together in a way that makes sense, that safeguards those things that we care about like vistas, horizons, and wildlife.’
Those are conversations Gordon has been having with other governors of western states, he added, bringing in ideas from everyone who is wrestling with many of the same issues.
“(New Mexico Governor) Michelle Lujan Grisham is talking about housing,” Gordon said. “Gov. (Tom) Cole is talking about geothermal … These are the issues that matter to people in the West. We have all the tools here, we can make the changes we need to. We just have to have the courage to do it and do it the right way.”
That will take innovation, Gordon acknowledged. But it’s a task he believes Wyoming and other Western states are up to.
“That’s not saying that you need to just go crazy,” Gordon said. “We have choices. And measuring those choices and building is what America does best. We have always been about innovation. We just have really fallen asleep over the last few years.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
