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As Utah Gov. Spencer Cox wrapped up a trip across the northern border to discuss trade partnerships with Canada, an ambassador from across the Atlantic landed in Salt Lake City with the aim of preserving business relationships.

European Union Ambassador Jovita Neliupšienė came to the Beehive State with a message: If President Donald Trump follows through with aggressive global tariffs, “nobody else but consumers will pay for that.”

Earlier this week, the Trump administration pressed pause on a “reciprocal” 20% tariff on all goods from the EU for 90 days — a move that Trump says will give the White House time to negotiate a better deal. The EU had announced retaliatory plans — now also shelved — hours earlier.

Still, a 10% minimum universal tariff and a 25% tariff on cars, steel and aluminum remain in place.

Neliupšienė told The Salt Lake Tribune in a Friday interview that she hopes Utah leaders can help increase pressure on Trump to negotiate a trade agreement. The ambassador is encouraging “every good word saying that tariffs will not solve the problem,” she said.

Her two-day agenda included visits with Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson and two of Utah’s six members of Congress — Reps. Burgess Owens and Mike Kennedy. Trade, Neliupšienė said, was the highest priority on her list as she entered the meetings.

Republican officials in Utah have so far had split reactions to Trump’s tariffs.

Cox has repeatedly expressed skepticism, saying during a news conference on PBS Utah last month, “I think it’s a huge gamble.”

Owens, ahead of his meeting with Neliupšienė, praised Trump’s tariff plans in a Thursday interview with Fox Business, calling the president “an absolute genius of an entrepreneur.”

“He’s showing what it is to reward good behavior,” Owens said. “All those countries decided they wanted to at least have a conversation — that’s good behavior. Those who decided to retaliate on us, then they’re cut out of this whole process.”

The EU is Utah’s second largest trade partner, Neliupšienė said. According to the ambassador, trade between Utah and EU member countries approaches $10 billion annually.

Beyond inflating prices and disrupting supply chains, Neliupšienė contended, increasing tariffs risks eliminating jobs. She said over the last decade, Utah jobs at EU companies have increased by 48%.

“Our economies are so interlinked,” Neliupšienė said.

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As they get ready to play the Utah Jazz (17-63) on Friday, April 11 at Delta Center, with the opening tip at 9:30 p.m. ET, the Oklahoma City Thunder (66-14) have nine players currently listed on the injury report. The Jazz’s injury report also has nine players on it.

The Thunder won their most recent game against the Suns, 125-112, on Wednesday. Jalen Williams starred with 33 points, and also had seven rebounds and five assists. On Wednesday, in their most recent game, the Jazz beat the Trail Blazers 133-126 in OT. With 30 points, Kyle Filipowski was their top scorer.

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Thunder vs. Jazz Game Info

• Date: Friday, April 11, 2025
• Time: 9:30 p.m. ET
• How to watch on TV: KJZZ and FDSOK
• Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
• Venue: Delta Center
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MONTREAL — Competing at the cutting edge of the world’s most disruptive technology depends, it turns out, on good office space.

Gov. Spencer Cox led a delegation of Utah business leaders and policymakers to one of the premier artificial intelligence research labs in the world on Tuesday to find out why.

The Mila Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute claims to have the largest concentration of AI machine learning academics globally, with 150 professors in partnered universities teaming up with over 140 companies exploring AI applications.

Located just north of Montreal’s Mount Royal, between the bustling markets of Little Italy, Mila boasts a catalog of nearly 2,600 scientific articles on AI since 2018, 734 current research projects and more than 40 successful start-ups over the last three years pioneering AI use in medical research, power grid resilience and product design.

The secret they shared with Utah? Mastering AI’s borderless potential requires bringing research and commercialization into close proximity — the tighter the better.

“We’re very impressed with what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve been able to do, bringing experts together,” Cox told Mila executives on Wednesday. “This is a model for some of the innovation that we want to see happening.”

Utah’s future AI hub

Utah’s own version of Mila is already in the works.

During the state’s 2025 legislative session, lawmakers approved $36.5 million in 2025, and recommended $63.5 million in 2026, for the construction of “Convergence Hall,” a new state-owned complex at The Point development in Draper, where the old state prison once stood.

Lawmakers envision a state-funded hub where investors, students, professors and government agencies will be housed together to create the largest “innovation campus” in the western United States, featuring access to state resources, a world class library, conference space and over 200 dorms.

The idea rests on Utah’s institutions of higher education — which will each have a dedicated space in the building — targeting their research and student projects around critical problems in local industry, particularly those being faced by the 200+ startups that will be invited to locate their operations on site.

If successful, proponents say, The Point will spur private sector investment in the surrounding area as businesses take advantage of the collection of expertise on emerging technologies in AI, energy and life sciences.

The legislator behind much of Utah’s approach to AI governance, state Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Sandy, said Convergence Hall will be more decentralized than the Canadian program, with more business buy-in and less public funding.

“Hopefully this can kind of be the nucleus of efforts going on all over the state,” Cullimore told the Deseret News at Mila. ”It can be the epicenter of what’s happening.“

Why did Utah’s trade mission go to Mila?

Despite a packed schedule — featuring meetings with provincial officials, tours at nuclear reactor sites and presentations with top Canadian investors — Cox said he made the Mila visit a priority of his trade mission because of how well positioned Utah businesses are to partner with Mila and replicate the institute’s approach in the Beehive State.

Cox’s delegation, made up of a group of around 30 cabinet members, state lawmakers, business leaders and university administrators, spent the week meeting with government agencies and industry experts in Quebec and Ontario to signal Utah’s desire to forge additional economic ties in the areas of critical minerals and artificial intelligence.

On Tuesday, Cox met with the Quebec minister of economy, innovation and energy to discuss collaboration around energy and AI. Both Quebec and Utah have plans to double their energy production as demands on the grid grow with the development of AI hubs and data centers.

Quebec minister Christine Fréchette and Ryan Starks, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, signed a letter of intent to establish a framework for closer collaboration in economic development, including AI.

It was “hugely” important for Utah’s entire delegation to visit Mila to understand best practices when it comes to regulating AI and integrating it into businesses, according to Jonathan Freedman, the CEO of World Trade Center Utah, which helped to organize the trade mission.

“The Mila Institute has the most cutting edge innovation and technological minds in the world when it comes to artificial intelligence,” Freedman said.

Freedman believes lasting connections will emerge from the trade mission between Utah companies and Mila, especially where higher education intersects with policy and industry.

If you ask Utah attendees, the return on investment has already begun as they look to follow the example of one groundbreaking Utah-born AI pharmaceutical company.

Utah trade mission already paying off?

A few years ago, Recursion, a biotech company based in Salt Lake City scored an office in Mila.

Company leaders realized that its novel approach to conducting millions of experiments on cells in a lab could revolutionize medical drug discovery if it was paired with AI modeling.

The office next to theirs was occupied by a small AI startup from Montreal called Valence, which had developed a system to predict the effect of medical compounds using digital AI experiments.

It wasn’t long before the occupants of both offices realized it made more sense to set up shop together: Recursion would provide the massive dataset from years of experimentation and Valence would provide the AI deep learning research to shift early experimentation to AI models so that the physical “wet labs” in Salt Lake could focus on the most promising compounds.

“It was obvious that if you were to combine those, the combination would be better than the sum of its parts,” said Sébastien Giguère, co-founder of Valence, in a presentation to the Utah trade mission.

Recursion has now established offices in Montreal, Toronto, New York City and the Bay Area through acquisitions of like-minded AI companies, including Valence, which was acquired in 2023.

Mila’s model of pairing innovative companies, like Recursion, with top researchers in the field, like Valence, set off multiple lightbulbs for Barclay Burns, the chief AI innovation officer at Utah Valley University, and a member of the trade delegation.

In his role, Burns also serves on the Utah Innovation Fund, a program of the Utah Board of Higher Education that will spearhead efforts to commercialize AI research done at Utah universities.

Burns is also working with some of the largest health care providers in the state to develop an AI program to connect families with autistic children to provide mutual support — which, coincidentally, is nearly identical to a project Mila is working on for the Quebec Autism Association.

Immediately following Tuesday’s presentations, Burns and Stéphane Létourneau, the executive vice president at Mila, began discussing ways to begin collaboration on these projects. Burns said he will stay in communication with Létourneau and that he will continue to work with the state Legislature to create a smaller version of Mila in Utah.

If the plans materialize, Burns said he believes a group the delegation met with on Monday, CDPQ, one of the largest investment funds in North America, could be interested in providing support.

“There’s opportunities for them to invest from their fund into a secure, stable set of investments that are also strategic,” Burns said. “It would help the Utah-Canadian connection but then it would also create a much more open pipeline to do other joint ventures.”

Canada looking to Utah on AI safety

Burns wasn’t the only one to connect with Canada’s AI experts on future opportunities.

Bill Brady, the CEO of Troomi, a kid-safe smartphone company aimed at healthy digital habits, also made plans to follow up with Mila experts about a potential collaboration. On Thursday, Brady was also able to consult with legal consultants at Gowling WLG about the possibility of introducing his product to the Canadian market.

Additionally, Paul Campbell, the honorary consul from Utah to Canada, and the owner of several companies, learned how his AI inventory business would fit into Canada’s regulatory environment. And Scott Larrivee, head of marketing & communications at Nusano, a company that creates radio isotopes for drug manufacturers, gained insight into how his company’s partners could better use their product to develop new therapeutics.

But there were some areas where the delegation’s Canadian counterparts were looking to Utah for advice.

The Beehive State has led the nation on AI policy, becoming the first state in 2024 to pass legislation clarifying that companies will be held liable if their use of AI violates consumer protection laws.

The bill was paired with another first-in-the-nation policy creating the Office of Artificial Intelligence whose AI policy lab works with industry stakeholders to explore potential guardrails while also providing certain legal leeway for companies that have a novel AI product they hope to test.

In 2025, the Legislature updated AI consumer protection code to require that companies disclose if they are using an AI-powered chat bot in high stakes situations, like those regarding personal finances, or in regulated industries, like mental health treatments.

The AI policy experts at Mila were already aware of these bills, according to the their sponsor, Sen. Cullimore, and were taking note of Utah’s approach to AI governance.

“It was really interesting to hear that a lot of the same things they’re discussing is what we’ve already discussed, and we’ve found a way to implement it, and they were pretty intrigued,” Cullimore said. “They actually praised Utah for being on the forefront of this.”

While not a purely scientific measure, the cost of a date isn’t a bad jumping-off point for a peek at the relative costs in different areas of the U.S.

A breakdown published earlier this year by The Black Tux shows, perhaps not surprisingly, that New York and San Francisco hold down the top two spots as most costly locales for a night out on the town. And, by comparison, Salt Lake City looks like an absolute bargain in its place, sitting in 40th among the top 50.

Turns out this discount date night data equates pretty well when it comes to a bigger, and more rigorous, assessment of Utah’s economy and particularly so for the state’s nation-leading status in household earnings and overall economic growth.

What’s behind the state’s high household income

A new report from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute found Utah households are No. 1 in the nation when measured by median household incomes, adjusted for the state’s cost of living. That figure, $98,336 is not only tops in the U.S. but 27% higher than the average across the country. Even when evaluated at a nominal level, and ignoring cost of living advantages, Utah’s $93,421 comes eighth nationally.

“In recent years, Utah’s median household income ranks high relative to other states, meaning Utah’s middle-income households earn more on average than middle-income households in other states,” according to the report.

Maryland and Massachusetts came in just behind Utah, while West Virginia and Mississippi had the lowest median household incomes in the country.

One of the primary drivers behind the difference between Utah’s nominal ranking and the cost-of-living adjusted figure is that the state remains solidly affordable, even in the face of rising housing-related costs.

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gardner researchers found that Utah is tracking well below the rest of the country in most, but not all, expense categories. Those include an all items measure, the cost of goods, utilities costs and “other services.” Utah ranks above the national average in only the housing category.

Those higher-than-average housing costs, driven by Utah’s soaring real estate market over the last few years, is blunted somewhat by the high rate of home ownership across the state, according to Gardner analysts.

“While some readily consider home prices when assessing cost of living, most Utahns (about 70%) own their homes, meaning higher home prices in recent years do not heavily weigh on the typical household’s budget and therefore do not result in a regional price parity score indicating higher than national average cost of living,” wrote Natalie Roney, Gardner research economist and author of the new report.

Cost-of-living varies widely across the state

While Utah, overall, remains solidly in the affordable category compared to the rest of the U.S., the cost of living factor, even within the state’s boundaries, varies widely.

“Urban areas like the Wasatch Front generally rank higher on cost-of-living measures than rural areas, although tourist hot spots also tend to be among the most expensive,” the report reads. “Summit County, for example, experiences the highest cost of living in Utah largely due to its tourist-driven economy.”

While Summit County residents are navigating a cost-of-living score of 111, with 100 representing the U.S. average, some rural counties come in well below that mark.

Emery County came in as the most affordable in the state, with an 81.3 on the cost-of-living index with Wayne County not too far behind with an 81.9 score. Counties that make up the state’s Wasatch Front had rates ranging from the low to upper 90s.

Big households are a big deal

Utah’s big household factor is also a big deal when it comes to pushing the state to the top of the income rankings.

Looking at the five-year average that includes the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data up to 2023, Utah had the nation’s largest average household size at 2.99 persons. That helped drive the country’s highest level of income earners, or labor participants, for each household at 1.59.

“Utah’s demographic composition in part explains Utah’s high ranking — Utah has the largest average household size and among the highest labor force participation rate,” according to the report. “Larger households lend toward more workers, increasing income potential for a given household.”

Utah’s overall economy kinda rules, too

Utah’s nation-leading numbers also extend into measures of the state’s overall economy.

For the first time ever, Utah’s GDP, a measure of the total value of goods and services produced in the state, broke the $300 billion mark in 2024, hitting $301 billion last year. Utah’s GDP year-over-year growth rate in 2024 came in at 4.5%, the highest in the U.S. The state is also holding down the No. 1 spot in cumulative GDP growth over the last 10 years with a 64% rate.

Phil Dean, chief economist for the Gardner Policy Institute, along with Roney, co-presented the report findings on Thursday and noted numerous factors have helped drive, and support, Utah’s robust economic performance.

“We often get asked why is Utah experiencing this growth,” Dean said. “I would go back to Utah’s very strong fundamentals. That we have a young and well-educated population, we have very competitive fiscal and regulatory policies that businesses really like. Our location as the Crossroads of the West is definitely a major contributor. If you look at the strong growth over the last several decades in the U.S. it’s in the South and the West but particularly the Intermountain West and we’re right in the middle of that.”

Dean also mentioned Utah’s “secret sauce” as a contributor to the state’s ongoing fiscal successes.

“And what we call social capital, social cohesion, our ability to talk to each other,” Dean said. “Our ability to work together. Sometimes we call that the secret sauce of what we do. It’s a topic that consistently comes up when people are looking to locate here.”