Kevin O’Leary’s proposed 9GW "hyperscale" AI data center in Utah will consume double the state's entire electricity usage and generate the waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day.
waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day
That actually makes the data complex a 16 gigawatt thermal load project, the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.
Those bombs would have about 14kt tnt equivalent each. tnt has about 4.18MJ/kg, so 4.18TJ/kt. 16GW over a day is 1.5PJ, so we have 330 kt per day.
This comparison will surely be useful to all designers of orion-drive style nuclear combustion power-plants.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-data-center-could-create/Open linkView original on reddthat.com
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Incidentally, tnt is about a tenth the energy density of the densest hydrocarbons, so this should take at least 30 thousand tons of oil or gas per day. And emit CO₂ on that scale. Probably more.
That's nothing compared to the 40GW ludicrousscale datacenter I'm proposing. To put it into perspective: that's more than 4 O'Learycenters. Now, who wants in? 😎