Month: May 2026

Hundreds of furious Utah residents packed a gym and erupted in chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” this week as county commissioners pushed through approval of “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary’s colossal AI data center project — a sprawling development critics warn could transform the rural region forever.

The controversial proposal ignited a political firestorm in Box Elder County, where regulators voted to advance O’Leary’s planned “hyperscale” data center — a massive complex expected to generate and consume more than twice the electricity currently used by the entire state of Utah.

The fierce backlash in Box Elder County, population 64,100, reflects a growing national revolt against massive AI data centers. Critics say the sites guzzle enormous amounts of water and electricity, receive lavish tax breaks and permanently transform rural communities while creating relatively few long-term jobs.

Last month, small-town Missourians voted to oust several councilmembers who backed a $6 billion data center despite intense opposition from locals.

Opponents of the Utah project have raised alarms over the potential for pollution, drought strain, rising energy demand and what they describe as a rushed approval process that gave residents little say over a development expected to reshape tens of thousands of acres of open land.

The proposed site would span roughly 60 square miles — making it nearly three times the size of Manhattan — and would be powered largely by natural gas, according to state officials.

Hundreds of residents jammed into the Box Elder County Commission’s special meeting Monday carrying protest signs and blasting commissioners over what critics described as a rushed and secretive process.

The fury inside the gym boiled over into hallways and parking lots as demonstrators shouted at officials after the vote, with some accusing county leaders of selling out the region’s land, water and air quality.

Commissioners moved the meeting from their usual chambers to a larger fairgrounds facility in Tremonton after anticipating an unusually large turnout, according to local reports.

O’Leary brushed off much of the backlash by claiming the demonstrations were fueled by outside agitators rather than local residents.

“We think over 90% of the protesters are actually not people that live in Utah or Box Elder County. They’re being bussed in,” the investor said this week in a video posted to social media.

The fallout from the vote became so heated that one commissioner said police officers were stationed outside commissioners’ homes after the meeting amid fears demonstrators could show up at there.

“Today I have policemen parked in front of my house,” Commissioner Lee Perry told ABC4, adding that protesters were “attacking, not just me personally, but my family.”

Scientists and environmental experts warned the proposed facility’s massive energy appetite could dramatically worsen pollution in Utah because the project would rely heavily on natural gas generation.

One Utah State University physicist estimated the project could raise the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 50%.

At full buildout, the sprawling AI campus is projected to require up to 9 gigawatts of electricity — more than double Utah’s current average statewide power consumption, according to state officials.

The project has also drawn scrutiny over lucrative incentives approved by state officials in an effort to secure the development.

Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, approved a sharply reduced energy tax rate of 0.5% for the project — far below the 6% rate it was authorized to charge.

State officials also acknowledged they aggressively fast-tracked the proposal as they competed with rival states to land the project.

“It’s a competition,” MIDA executive director Paul Morris said last month. “That’s also why we’ve been rushing it so fast.”

Kirk Offel, CEO of Overwatch Mission Critical, told The Post that the Utah project’s proposed 9-gigawatt scale would have been unimaginable just a few years ago — but said the AI boom is rapidly changing the economics and infrastructure demands of the industry.

“Nine gigawatts is aggressive. But it’s not unrealistic. Not anymore,” Offel said.

“We are no longer building data centers, we are building industrial infrastructure for intelligence.”

Offel said the biggest challenge facing hyperscale AI projects is no longer demand, but execution — including whether developers can secure enough power, build workforce capacity and maintain community trust.

He also acknowledged the enormous environmental concerns surrounding the Utah proposal, saying projects of this size force “hard choices into the open’ over water use, emissions and sustainability.”

“Natural gas is being used as a bridge, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s available, scalable, and dispatchable right now,” Offel told The Post.

“The real issue is this: We have demand moving at exponential speed, and policy, infrastructure, and environmental alignment moving at linear speed.”

As parents scramble to protect their children from the adverse effects of a free and open internet, lawmakers are increasingly restricting access to untoward content via age verification laws. Enforcement, however, has proven difficult, with constituents often flocking to tools like virtual private networks to circumvent restrictions. As a response, lawmakers have advocated restricting access to VPNs, which camouflage a user’s location by spoofing their IP address. While VPN restrictions have been deployed in totalitarian countries like North Korea, Belarus, China and Russia, age limits that necessitate them to enforce are increasingly popular in liberal nations like the U.K. and Australia. Some American states, like Wisconsin and Michigan, have attempted to codify VPN bans. On May 6, 2026, Utah became the first state to officially effectively combat users’ access to the privacy tool.

Utah’s state Senate Bill 73, dubbed Online Age Verification Amendments, was signed by Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox in March. The law, which largely focuses on taxing websites exhibiting adult content, sets several age verification provisions. Critically, SB73 shifts liability for minors accessing adult content onto the websites themselves. This constitutes a major shift in the state’s content censorship rules, as online providers will be legally liable for verifying the age of all users located in Utah, regardless of if they’re using a VPN to mask their location. 

Advocates argue that such provisions act as a soft VPN ban, potentially forcing websites to prevent all traffic from known VPN IP addresses. While this form of enforcement is significantly less extreme than some proposed bans, specifically Wisconsin’s now-abandoned law which sought to ban the technology outright, Utah’s new restrictions could prove a watershed moment for American censorship online. Advocates warn the move creates a dangerous precedent with major implications for national censorship laws. 

Read more: 12 Common Windows Apps You Should Uninstall Immediately, According To Experts

Inside SB73

To ensure that Utah residents adhere to the state’s new age restriction rules, SB73 imposes two new provisions concerning VPN usage. The first extends companies’ legal liability for users violating the state’s age regulations, requiring companies to restrict access from any underage users physically located in the state. Second, it prevents entities with “a substantial portion of material harmful to minors” from sharing information related to VPNs.

Although these may sound like minor changes, advocates worry that they could force websites to indiscriminately apply age verification measures. For one, websites cannot accurately determine VPN users’ true locations, potentially forcing companies operating in Utah to apply age verification rules across a VPN company’s entire customer base. Determining who’s using a VPN, for that matter, is equally difficult, since VPN companies routinely add new IP addresses, rendering VPN blacklists ineffective. In a statement given to TechRadar, popular VPN provider NordVPN gave the issue the moniker of a “liability trap.” Because Utah’s age restriction mandate is essentially unenforceable, NordVPN argues, it forces websites into making age verification rules universal, and thus subjecting  “millions of users to invasive identity checks [when] they have no legal obligation.”

It’s important to note that Utah’s restrictions are not a hard-and-fast mandate. Instead, it deploys what the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit focused on defending digital rights, dubs a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, in which “websites likely only have an obligation to ask for proof of age if they actually learn that a user is physically in Utah and using a VPN.” Rather than assuage concerns, however, EFF argues that such legal uncertainties create “a dangerous precedent” that “threatens to significantly undermine digital privacy rights.”

Implications

This discussion must be held within the context of the broader age verification debate, which activists argue unduly infringes on users’ privacy. To enforce age restriction rules, websites must require access to sensitive information, ranging from government IDs and biometric data to users’ online browsing histories. Increasingly, websites like Google are feeding some amalgamation of this data into AI algorithms to determine user’s ages. According to EFF, each of these age verification methods “demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity.” Some activists argue that age verification rules function more to feed surveillance structures than safety measures. Furthermore, users worry that providing personal data creates major security concerns, exemplified by a slew of high-profile hacks of age verification providers in recent years.

As the first American age verification law to directly address VPN usage, Utah’s SB73 sets a dangerous precedent while offering little practical utility. By roping VPNs into its online censorship laws, Utah expands the Overton Window for American lawmakers looking to restrict constituent’s online activities. In doing so, the ban potentially sets the stage for more invasive restrictions without making its constituents’ online lives any safer. In fact, Utah’s SB73 exemplifies a legal paradigm in which privacy measures are increasingly treated as “loopholes” rather than security tools. 

Utah is far from the only jurisdiction pushing for more invasive age verification rules. As governments around the world look to mitigate minor’s exposure to social media, pornography, and other sensitive materials, VPNs have increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs. Ultimately, restricting their usage potentially causes more damage than benefits.

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Members of the Utah football coaching staff recently checked in with one of their top targets in the 2027 class ahead of an important campus visit.

Late Tuesday night, blue-chip wide receiver prospect Blake Wong shared on his X account that Utes offensive coordinator Kevin McGiven and wide receivers coach Chad Bumphis stopped by his home to meet with him and his family before his schedule trip to Salt Lake City.

Wong, who’s arranged an official visit with Utah for May 29, is a consensus four-star recruit and top-45 wide receiver in the 2027 class. He’s garnered interest from high-level programs throughout his recruitment and narrowed down his options to Utah, BYU, Ohio State, Oregon and UCLA.

Utah wasn’t the first of Wong’s finalists to pay him a home visit since he announced his top five schools in April; Ohio State wide receivers coach Cortez Hankton Jr. stopped by his home recently, and not long after BYU wide receiver coaches Fesi Sitake and Raelon Singleton pitched the Cougars to the 6-foot-1 prospect, according to his X account.

Wong will have more opportunities to further his relationships with each coaching staff in the coming weeks as he tours the campuses of his finalists. Following his Salt Lake City trip, the Norco High School (California) product will head closer to home to check out UCLA on June 5 — only to then turn around and head back to the Beehive State for his BYU visit on June 8. A couple of stops in Eugene, Oregon, to see Dan Lanning and the Ducks (June 12) and Columbus, Ohio, to see Ryan Day and the Buckeyes (June 19) round out his visit schedule for the summer.

Morgan Scalley and company will look to capitalize on their chance to host Wong first later this month. According to an April report from 247Sports, Ohio State has been considered the frontrunners in the race to land his signature, while the two Utah schools have been viewed as “dark horse candidates.”

That being said, it’d be a massive recruiting win for Scalley and the Utah staff if they were to undercut three Big Ten schools and their in-state rival for Wong, the No. 31-ranked wide receiver recruit in the country according to 247Sports. The Utes haven’t snagged a wide receiver prospect of his caliber in some time, and have had to rely on the transfer portal market to replenish their depth at the position for the last couple of offseasons.

Wong, the No. 243-ranked player in the nation overall, also holds offers from Arizona State, Michigan State, Purdue, Washington and Duke, among others.

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

The Utah Jazz head into this offseason likely with a big focus surrounding the internal development of their young players, and hoping to nurture some steady growth along with it.

At the same time, that’s not to say a few trades might not also be in the works to bring in some external talent for a front office that’s shown no reservations to make a deal here or there over the past few years.

As the offseason action begins to heat up as playoff teams gradually get eliminated, we’ve already seen a fair amount of big names enter the trade rumor mill that might be of interest to the Jazz and their roster-building efforts.

But this time, we’re digging a bit deeper into some trade candidates that might not be as highly talked about around the league, though could be someone Utah could look into as a fit for themselves.

Here’s three intriguing players who could fit that fold for Utah this summer:

Naji Marshall | F, Dallas Mavericks

Someone who could, and should be squarely on the Jazz’s trade radar is Mavericks two-way wing Naji Marshall, who currently sits on a $9 million expiring deal, and could be a name new president Masai Ujiri sees value in pivoting off of now, if there were no plans to retain him under this new regime.

He fits the bill of what the Jazz need: more defenders. Marshall has been a consistent, versatile piece on that end of the floor for the past several years, and has just started to expand his offensive game after a career year of averaging over 15 points a night in Dallas.

He could be the most expensive piece to acquire on this list after the year he just had, but he’d be worth a strong investment from the Jazz to help round this roster out on both ends of the floor, so long as they had plans to keep him beyond the last year of his deal.

Tristan Da Silva | F, Orlando Magic

Tristan Da Silva and the Magic are fresh off a humbling first-round loss where they gave up a 3-1 lead to the Detroit Pistons, and now enter an offseason where organizational change has already ensued in the form of finding a new head coach.

Maybe that turnover translates to a few roster pieces as well. And if it does, Da Silva could make some sense for the Jazz to keep an eye on. He’s a lengthy 6-foot-8 wing who’s shown positive development across his first two years in the league, even if he was a little phased out of the Magic’s playoff rotation.

With two years left on his rookie deal, he could be a cheap, worthwhile pickup for the Jazz, in the event the Magic were looking to turn in another direction.

Devin Carter | G, Sacramento Kings

Devin Carter’s stock since entering the league as a lottery selection two years ago has seen a pretty steep drop-off.

Carter’s played in just 74 games since being selected 13th overall by the Kings in 2024, has shot a career 27.4% from three, and could very well be on his way out of Sacramento this offseason if their front office lands the right package.

For the Jazz, he might not be a rotational fit right away, as there are some kinks to work out in his development. But he does fit the perimeter defensive upside that Utah desperately needs, and they could take a flier on him with a low-risk package that could eventually turn into someone who’s a positive two-way presence.

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