We Are Building Data Centers Blind

Why I’m proposing a two-year moratorium on new data centers in Utah

Aerial view of the enormous data center near Salt Lake Community College on 90th South—spanning multiple city blocks and built right up against neighborhood homes— highlighting the urgent need to plan infrastructure and community impact in Utah’s future.

Data centers may be one of the only political issues left that Utahns broadly agree on. I have raised this with Republicans and Democrats, with people deeply involved in politics and people who would rather chew glass than talk about it, at doors, in conversations, with people inside government and people who just want government to stop making their lives harder. The reaction is remarkably consistent: people know something about what we are doing does not make sense. And the deeper I have gotten into this issue, the clearer the problem has become. Utah is allowing an entirely new class of massive industrial infrastructure to be built without anything resembling a comprehensive statewide framework governing its impact on our water, power grid, air, communities, or taxpayers. We figured out how to incentivize these facilities before we figured out how to govern them. That is backwards.

So if I am elected, I intend to file legislation in the 2027 General Session establishing a two-year statewide moratorium on new data center development while Utah builds the regulatory framework that should have existed before the first shovel went into the ground. This is not a permanent ban, and it is not an argument that Utah should somehow opt out of the digital economy. It is a pause long enough for us to stop, look at what we are doing, understand the consequences, write the rules, and then decide how and where we build. Because right now, we are building blind.

When I say Utah does not have a real statewide framework for data centers, I mean there is no comprehensive set of standards answering some very basic questions. How much water should one of these facilities be allowed to consume? Where should that water come from, and what happens during a drought year? If a data center places hundreds of megawatts of new demand on the electrical grid, who pays for the generation and transmission infrastructure required to serve it? What limits should exist on diesel or Natural Gas backup generators and other emissions? What about continuous industrial noise, waste heat, emergency planning, or the cumulative impact when several of these facilities are built in the same region? And perhaps most importantly, what does the community hosting this infrastructure actually receive in exchange?

Those are not anti-business questions. Those are governing questions. But while Utah has been slow to answer them, we have been remarkably efficient at building the incentive machinery: tax abatements, preferential agreements, infrastructure commitments, and economic development packages negotiated facility by facility, often long before the average resident has any idea what is being proposed. That tells us something. We have developed an industry policy without developing an industry framework, and those are not the same thing. Whenever government leaves that gap open, somebody eventually pays for it.

The more I look at data centers, the more I think we need to stop pretending they are simply large office buildings full of computers. They are industrial infrastructure, and in many ways they function like an extractive industry. They draw water from a basin, enormous amounts of electricity from the grid, and large amounts of land. They require transmission infrastructure, substations, roads, emergency services, and public utilities. They produce heat, noise, emissions, and enormous physical footprints, while much of the economic value created inside those buildings can flow anywhere in the world.

That does not make data centers inherently bad. We need digital infrastructure. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, financial systems, healthcare systems, government networks, entertainment, communications, and nearly every other part of modern life depend on it. I am not interested in pretending that we can somehow opt out of the digital future. But if these facilities are going to operate in Utah, consume Utah resources, use Utah infrastructure, and affect Utah communities, then Utah has every right to establish the terms under which they operate.

We have learned some version of this lesson before with mining, oil and gas, and other extractive industries where communities were promised prosperity and later discovered that profits could leave while environmental damage, infrastructure costs, or cleanup obligations stayed behind. We should probably stop learning the same lesson after the fact. Economic development can be good, but growth without rules is not a development strategy. It is a gamble, and the public should not be the one holding all the downside risk.

This is where the conversation stops being abstract, because eventually somebody gets the bill. Imagine a piece of land that could support hundreds of homes. Those homes would pay property taxes year after year and help support schools, fire departments, police, roads, parks, water systems, and the basic machinery of local government. Now replace that development with a massive industrial facility receiving a long-term property tax incentive. The community’s expenses do not disappear. Schools still need teachers, the fire department still responds, roads still need maintenance, water infrastructure still has to function, and now the electrical system may need major upgrades to accommodate a single enormous customer.

The revenue requirement does not magically vanish. It moves, and too often it moves down to everyone else: homeowners, renters through their landlords, small businesses, working families, and people on fixed incomes. That is the part of these economic development deals that rarely gets explained clearly enough. A tax incentive is not free money. If government decides one taxpayer does not have to contribute its normal share, everyone else still has to finance the community around it.

So the question should never simply be, “How many jobs will this project create?” We should be asking what the total public cost is, what the total public benefit is, who carries the difference, and whether the people making the deal are willing to put those numbers in front of the public before the agreement is signed. And I want to be very clear about who my frustration is directed toward. It is not the electricians, engineers, construction workers, technicians, or families who may work in these facilities. Those are real jobs held by real people. My problem is with a political process that gives away public leverage before the public even realizes it had leverage to begin with.

I have also been asked why I am talking about a two-year moratorium instead of simply pausing construction for one legislative session. The answer is pretty straightforward: I have watched how the Utah Legislature works. One year sounds reasonable until you remember that our General Session lasts forty-five days, and then consider what we are actually asking lawmakers to understand. Water engineering, electrical generation, transmission capacity, utility regulation, land use, tax policy, air quality, noise, environmental impact modeling studies, economic development, local zoning authority, artificial intelligence infrastructure, emergency preparedness, public health, and rapidly changing technology all intersect here.

Trying to understand all of that, draft comprehensive legislation, move it through committees, negotiate amendments, pass both chambers, and have something ready for the governor in one forty-five-day session is not serious policymaking. It is how you end up with rushed legislation written under deadline pressure by whoever happened to walk into the Capitol with a finished draft. And Utah has seen enough of that style of government.

Two years gives us an entire interim cycle to do this in daylight. Bring in water engineers, grid operators, municipalities, economists, environmental scientists, technology companies, utilities, workers, and the residents who actually live next to these facilities. Conduct the studies. Put everybody on the record. Let legislators ask questions. Let the public hear the answers. Then write the legislation based on what we actually learned. Two years is not obstruction. It is the time required to do something this consequential competently rather than pretending forty-five days is enough because that is politically more convenient.

A moratorium that simply freezes development and accomplishes nothing else would be a wasted opportunity, so the pause has to come with the work. We need water accountability. If a facility is going to consume enormous quantities of water in one of the driest states in the country, we should know exactly how much it uses, where that water comes from, how efficiently it is being used, and what happens when drought conditions require conservation. That becomes even more important when we are simultaneously trying to protect and restore the Great Salt Lake.

We also need energy accountability. New industrial electrical demand should not simply be dropped onto the existing grid and quietly transferred to residential ratepayers. If a data center creates the need for new generation, substations, transmission, or other major infrastructure, the company creating that demand should be responsible for a fair share of building it. Innovation is not innovative if the business model depends on everybody else subsidizing the power system underneath it.

We need standards for emissions, heat, noise, and neighborhood impact, because nobody should discover after construction that the industrial facility behind their house produces a constant low-frequency hum twenty-four hours a day. We need real transparency around public incentives. If taxpayers are subsidizing a project, taxpayers should be able to see the deal: what is being waived, for how long, what is being promised in return, and what happens if those promises are not met. Public money should require public accountability.

Local communities also need an actual voice. I believe in local control when politicians really mean local control. Cities should not be reduced to spectators while state government and multinational corporations decide what their neighborhoods are going to become. At the same time, Utah needs a statewide baseline because water, electricity, air quality, and regional infrastructure do not stop at municipal boundaries. The state should establish the guardrails, and communities should have meaningful authority within them.

Finally, we need a clear standard for what these companies owe the communities hosting them. If you consume enormous amounts of public infrastructure, you should invest in the public infrastructure making your business possible. That is not punishment. It is not anti-business. It is the basic expectation of being a neighbor.

And that gets to the larger question, because this is not really an argument about servers. It is an argument about whether Utah plans its future or simply gets developed by it. The same question keeps appearing everywhere I look: housing, transportation, water, energy, artificial intelligence, the Great Salt Lake, public transit, data privacy, and infrastructure. Are we actually designing the Utah we want to live in fifty or seventy-five years from now, or are we making isolated deals today and assuming somebody in the future will figure out how all the pieces fit together?

A large part of why I am running for the Legislature is because I want Utah to start thinking on a much longer timeline. I talk a lot about building the foundation for Utah’s 22nd century. That sounds distant until you remember that infrastructure we build today may still be operating then. Transmission corridors built now will shape where cities grow. Water policy written now will help determine what communities can sustainably exist. Transportation systems built now will influence how millions of people move. And the digital infrastructure being constructed right now may become every bit as foundational to the next century as railroads, highways, telecommunications, and the electrical grid were to the last one.

That should make us ambitious, but it should also make us careful. Growth is not something that simply happens to us. Technology is not something that simply happens to us. The future is not something that simply happens to us. We get to shape it, and that means government has to be willing to think beyond the next ribbon cutting, the next tax incentive, or the next election cycle.

Utah has the engineering talent. We have the universities. We have a growing technology sector. We have planners, scientists, workers, communities, and public institutions capable of doing this well. What we have lacked is the willingness to stop long enough to ask what “doing it well” actually means. That is what this moratorium is about: understanding what we are building before we lock ourselves into decades of consequences, and writing rules that protect our water, our electrical grid, our air, our communities, and the Utah families who should not be quietly subsidizing somebody else’s infrastructure.

Then let the industry build. Let it innovate. Let it grow. But let it come here under rules written by Utahns, for Utah, with the expectation that if you want to become part of our future, you also accept a responsibility to the people and resources making that future possible.

We write the rules first. Then we build.

Drew HowellsCandidate for Utah House District 39

Data centers may be one of the only political issues left that Utahns broadly agree on. I have raised this with Republicans and Democrats, with people deeply involved in politics and people who would rather chew glass than talk about it, at doors, in conversations, with people inside government and people who just want government to stop making their lives harder. The reaction is remarkably consistent: people know something about what we are doing does not make sense. And the deeper I have gotten into this issue, the clearer the problem has become. Utah is allowing an entirely new class of massive industrial infrastructure to be built without anything resembling a comprehensive statewide framework governing its impact on our water, power grid, air, communities, or taxpayers. We figured out how to incentivize these facilities before we figured out how to govern them. That is backwards.

So if I am elected, I intend to file legislation in the 2027 General Session establishing a two-year statewide moratorium on new data center development while Utah builds the regulatory framework that should have existed before the first shovel went into the ground. This is not a permanent ban, and it is not an argument that Utah should somehow opt out of the digital economy. It is a pause long enough for us to stop, look at what we are doing, understand the consequences, write the rules, and then decide how and where we build. Because right now, we are building blind.

When I say Utah does not have a real statewide framework for data centers, I mean there is no comprehensive set of standards answering some very basic questions. How much water should one of these facilities be allowed to consume? Where should that water come from, and what happens during a drought year? If a data center places hundreds of megawatts of new demand on the electrical grid, who pays for the generation and transmission infrastructure required to serve it? What limits should exist on diesel or Natural Gas backup generators and other emissions? What about continuous industrial noise, waste heat, emergency planning, or the cumulative impact when several of these facilities are built in the same region? And perhaps most importantly, what does the community hosting this infrastructure actually receive in exchange?

Those are not anti-business questions. Those are governing questions. But while Utah has been slow to answer them, we have been remarkably efficient at building the incentive machinery: tax abatements, preferential agreements, infrastructure commitments, and economic development packages negotiated facility by facility, often long before the average resident has any idea what is being proposed. That tells us something. We have developed an industry policy without developing an industry framework, and those are not the same thing. Whenever government leaves that gap open, somebody eventually pays for it.

The more I look at data centers, the more I think we need to stop pretending they are simply large office buildings full of computers. They are industrial infrastructure, and in many ways they function like an extractive industry. They draw water from a basin, enormous amounts of electricity from the grid, and large amounts of land. They require transmission infrastructure, substations, roads, emergency services, and public utilities. They produce heat, noise, emissions, and enormous physical footprints, while much of the economic value created inside those buildings can flow anywhere in the world.

That does not make data centers inherently bad. We need digital infrastructure. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, financial systems, healthcare systems, government networks, entertainment, communications, and nearly every other part of modern life depend on it. I am not interested in pretending that we can somehow opt out of the digital future. But if these facilities are going to operate in Utah, consume Utah resources, use Utah infrastructure, and affect Utah communities, then Utah has every right to establish the terms under which they operate.

We have learned some version of this lesson before with mining, oil and gas, and other extractive industries where communities were promised prosperity and later discovered that profits could leave while environmental damage, infrastructure costs, or cleanup obligations stayed behind. We should probably stop learning the same lesson after the fact. Economic development can be good, but growth without rules is not a development strategy. It is a gamble, and the public should not be the one holding all the downside risk.

This is where the conversation stops being abstract, because eventually somebody gets the bill. Imagine a piece of land that could support hundreds of homes. Those homes would pay property taxes year after year and help support schools, fire departments, police, roads, parks, water systems, and the basic machinery of local government. Now replace that development with a massive industrial facility receiving a long-term property tax incentive. The community’s expenses do not disappear. Schools still need teachers, the fire department still responds, roads still need maintenance, water infrastructure still has to function, and now the electrical system may need major upgrades to accommodate a single enormous customer.

The revenue requirement does not magically vanish. It moves, and too often it moves down to everyone else: homeowners, renters through their landlords, small businesses, working families, and people on fixed incomes. That is the part of these economic development deals that rarely gets explained clearly enough. A tax incentive is not free money. If government decides one taxpayer does not have to contribute its normal share, everyone else still has to finance the community around it.

So the question should never simply be, “How many jobs will this project create?” We should be asking what the total public cost is, what the total public benefit is, who carries the difference, and whether the people making the deal are willing to put those numbers in front of the public before the agreement is signed. And I want to be very clear about who my frustration is directed toward. It is not the electricians, engineers, construction workers, technicians, or families who may work in these facilities. Those are real jobs held by real people. My problem is with a political process that gives away public leverage before the public even realizes it had leverage to begin with.

I have also been asked why I am talking about a two-year moratorium instead of simply pausing construction for one legislative session. The answer is pretty straightforward: I have watched how the Utah Legislature works. One year sounds reasonable until you remember that our General Session lasts forty-five days, and then consider what we are actually asking lawmakers to understand. Water engineering, electrical generation, transmission capacity, utility regulation, land use, tax policy, air quality, noise, environmental impact modeling studies, economic development, local zoning authority, artificial intelligence infrastructure, emergency preparedness, public health, and rapidly changing technology all intersect here.

Trying to understand all of that, draft comprehensive legislation, move it through committees, negotiate amendments, pass both chambers, and have something ready for the governor in one forty-five-day session is not serious policymaking. It is how you end up with rushed legislation written under deadline pressure by whoever happened to walk into the Capitol with a finished draft. And Utah has seen enough of that style of government.

Two years gives us an entire interim cycle to do this in daylight. Bring in water engineers, grid operators, municipalities, economists, environmental scientists, technology companies, utilities, workers, and the residents who actually live next to these facilities. Conduct the studies. Put everybody on the record. Let legislators ask questions. Let the public hear the answers. Then write the legislation based on what we actually learned. Two years is not obstruction. It is the time required to do something this consequential competently rather than pretending forty-five days is enough because that is politically more convenient.

A moratorium that simply freezes development and accomplishes nothing else would be a wasted opportunity, so the pause has to come with the work. We need water accountability. If a facility is going to consume enormous quantities of water in one of the driest states in the country, we should know exactly how much it uses, where that water comes from, how efficiently it is being used, and what happens when drought conditions require conservation. That becomes even more important when we are simultaneously trying to protect and restore the Great Salt Lake.

We also need energy accountability. New industrial electrical demand should not simply be dropped onto the existing grid and quietly transferred to residential ratepayers. If a data center creates the need for new generation, substations, transmission, or other major infrastructure, the company creating that demand should be responsible for a fair share of building it. Innovation is not innovative if the business model depends on everybody else subsidizing the power system underneath it.

We need standards for emissions, heat, noise, and neighborhood impact, because nobody should discover after construction that the industrial facility behind their house produces a constant low-frequency hum twenty-four hours a day. We need real transparency around public incentives. If taxpayers are subsidizing a project, taxpayers should be able to see the deal: what is being waived, for how long, what is being promised in return, and what happens if those promises are not met. Public money should require public accountability.

Local communities also need an actual voice. I believe in local control when politicians really mean local control. Cities should not be reduced to spectators while state government and multinational corporations decide what their neighborhoods are going to become. At the same time, Utah needs a statewide baseline because water, electricity, air quality, and regional infrastructure do not stop at municipal boundaries. The state should establish the guardrails, and communities should have meaningful authority within them.

Finally, we need a clear standard for what these companies owe the communities hosting them. If you consume enormous amounts of public infrastructure, you should invest in the public infrastructure making your business possible. That is not punishment. It is not anti-business. It is the basic expectation of being a neighbor.

And that gets to the larger question, because this is not really an argument about servers. It is an argument about whether Utah plans its future or simply gets developed by it. The same question keeps appearing everywhere I look: housing, transportation, water, energy, artificial intelligence, the Great Salt Lake, public transit, data privacy, and infrastructure. Are we actually designing the Utah we want to live in fifty or seventy-five years from now, or are we making isolated deals today and assuming somebody in the future will figure out how all the pieces fit together?

A large part of why I am running for the Legislature is because I want Utah to start thinking on a much longer timeline. I talk a lot about building the foundation for Utah’s 22nd century. That sounds distant until you remember that infrastructure we build today may still be operating then. Transmission corridors built now will shape where cities grow. Water policy written now will help determine what communities can sustainably exist. Transportation systems built now will influence how millions of people move. And the digital infrastructure being constructed right now may become every bit as foundational to the next century as railroads, highways, telecommunications, and the electrical grid were to the last one.

That should make us ambitious, but it should also make us careful. Growth is not something that simply happens to us. Technology is not something that simply happens to us. The future is not something that simply happens to us. We get to shape it, and that means government has to be willing to think beyond the next ribbon cutting, the next tax incentive, or the next election cycle.

Utah has the engineering talent. We have the universities. We have a growing technology sector. We have planners, scientists, workers, communities, and public institutions capable of doing this well. What we have lacked is the willingness to stop long enough to ask what “doing it well” actually means. That is what this moratorium is about: understanding what we are building before we lock ourselves into decades of consequences, and writing rules that protect our water, our electrical grid, our air, our communities, and the Utah families who should not be quietly subsidizing somebody else’s infrastructure.

Then let the industry build. Let it innovate. Let it grow. But let it come here under rules written by Utahns, for Utah, with the expectation that if you want to become part of our future, you also accept a responsibility to the people and resources making that future possible.

We write the rules first. Then we build.

Drew Howells

Candidate for Utah House District 39