The president of the Utah State Senate who championed a huge data center beside the Great Salt Lake was defeated in his Republican primary on Tuesday night, one of the most high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center projects.
The vote to oust J. Stuart Adams was a stunner. Mr. Adams was one of the longest-serving and most powerful politicians in the solidly Republican state of Utah and had won earlier re-elections with little opposition.
Mr. Adams lost his Senate seat to Stephanie Hollist, a former university lawyer, who accused Mr. Adams and Utah’s political establishment of lacking transparency and ignoring their own voters by approving a data center project backed by the celebrity investor and “Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary.
Mr. Adams did not directly represent the 40,000-acre proposed site of the data center in Box Elder County, a fast-growing farming and industrial area about 60 miles north of Salt Lake City.
But he became the focus of an anti-data-center groundswell because he served as chairman of a Utah agency that approved initial plans this spring to build the data center, known as Stratos.
Thousands of Utah voters, many of them lifelong Republicans and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, objected, venting their frustration in public comments and heated public meetings.
They worried about how much energy it would consume and how its water usage would affect the drought-stricken Great Salt Lake, and accused state officials of granting the project generous tax breaks while ignoring the public’s concerns.
On Wednesday afternoon, two Republican commissioners in Box Elder County who voted to move ahead with the data center were narrowly behind in their own primary re-elections, though those results had not been called.
Mr. O’Leary has said the project would generate thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, would generate all of its own power and could actually end up contributing water to the Great Salt Lake.
Mr. Adams did not directly address the Stratos project in his concession on Tuesday night but congratulated Ms. Hollist on her win and said he had worked to “champion policies that have strengthened Utah, supported businesses, helped working families.”
Ms. Hollist said that her win over Mr. Adams showed that voters were “tired of feeling like they’re not seeing themselves represented in government.” She is expected to win the November general election in the heavily Republican district, and Utah legislators will have to pick a new Senate president.
Mr. Adams had won re-election for years with minimal opposition, but Ms. Hollist said she heard from many discontented residents as she knocked on doors over the past six months to introduce herself. The data center, she said, had been “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for voters in Mr. Adams’s northern Utah district.
The public’s concern showed that Republican voters were just as worried about the impact of data centers as Democrats, she said: “It concerns our way of life — our resources, our water, our air quality. Across the Republican spectrum, people care about it.”
The furious debate over building A.I. data centers has helped to tip races in Alabama, Missouri, Wisconsin and beyond, with supporters arguing they will generate money and jobs and opponents assailing their environmental impacts and a lack of transparency surrounding their approval and operations.
In April, St. Louis Public Radio reported that voters in Festus, Mo., ousted four city councilors who had supported a $6 billion data center project. That same month, voters in Menomonie, Wis., elected a new mayor who campaigned on his opposition to data centers, according to ABC News 18.
In May, when state officials in Utah voted to move ahead with the Stratos data center, Mr. Adams praised it, saying, “This project supports the free world through reliable energy supply while creating real opportunity for communities here at home.”
But as the issue heated up in Utah’s primary election, Mr. Adams changed his tune, sending Mr. O’Leary a letter that demanded huge cuts to the size and scope of the project. Mr. O’Leary obliged. The Stratos project has not broken ground yet and still needs to go through several other reviews.
Mr. Adams’s campaign sent out mailers that praised Mr. Adams for getting tough on data centers, including one that showed Mr. O’Leary underwater inside a Utah-shaped shark tank. The image appears to be generated by artificial intelligence.
Julie Bosman and David W. Chen contributed reporting.
The post Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash appeared first on New York Times.
