Utah News

A Utah data center has secured a $2 billion investment — the second largest of its kind — to build the remainder of its West Jordan campus.

When it’s done, Novva’s 100-acre campus will be “one of the largest superclusters” of servers in the United States, said CEO Wes Swenson, powering 175 megawatts to data servers around the world.

Novva built the first stage of its Utah campus in 2020 and the $2 billion investment from JPMorgan Chase and Starwood Property Group will help the company finish the two remaining buildings, Swensen said.

It also is the second $2 billion loan awarded to a data center this year, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Most data construction loans before January were less than $1 billion. Swenson said he is glad this investment is happening in Utah.

“I have a super high conviction to the Utah market, our employees and community,” said Swenson, who lives in Utah County.

Utah is high …

Utah is well positioned to house massive data centers like Novva, the chief executive said. Up at altitude — Novva sits at roughly 4,000 feet above sea level — the air is cooler. Data centers need to keep servers cool. Most use evaporative cooling to keep temperatures low — Novva can literally pull from the air to cool its cooling liquid most of the year, Swenson said.

The Beehive State also doesn’t have to worry about intense natural disasters, Swenson said — though he does have a precise seismograph to monitor for any earthquake activity.

There are 39 data centers in Utah, according to the Data Center Map. Twenty-six of them are in the Salt Lake metro area.

Utah’s business-friendly ecosystem also helps incentivize data centers in the state, said Jim Buie, CEO of ValorC3 Data Centers (formerly Tonaquint). Valor has been around since 2008 and has capitalized on Utah’s “good growth trajectory” — tax incentives, low-cost power and fiber optic connectivity.

“Those are all wonderful ingredients for not just tech, but certainly the data center business,” Buie said.

… and dry

The need for data centers has exploded in recent years as AI has become an everyday tool for internet users. The amount of new data center construction in the top eight markets more than doubled in 2024 compared to the year prior, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Buie said he and other industry analysts expect generation to quadruple over the next four years — “both the quantity [of centers] and the amount of power that data centers use.” If Utah can keep up with the electricity demand — a big focus in the legislative session and Gov. Spencer Cox’s budget this year — it’s poised to lead the nation in “driving the digital economy,” Buie said.

But one of Utah’s scarcest resources is also the most critical to many data centers: water.

Most centers cool their servers through evaporative cooling, which can use millions of gallons of water each month.

Novva uses coolant, not water, to cool its servers, Swenson said — meaning that roughly 100,000 gallons of the campus’s million-gallon annual water consumption are used in Novva’s closed-loop cooling system. The remaining 90%, he said, is for plumbing, like toilets, sinks, and drinking fountains.

“It’s equal to about three homes annually,” Swenson said. “We’re considered a zero-water footprint.”

Not all centers are so water-conscious, Buie said, although they will likely have to be in order to succeed. Valor also uses a closed-loop cooling system, Buie said, which saves water from evaporation.

Novva’s brand-new campus buildings should both be done by mid-2026, Swenson said. The servers that will fill them are already leased.

“They have to be built somewhere,” Swenson said of large data centers. “This is as good a place as any as long as we’re good stewards.”

Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.

Utah Attorney General Derek Brown announced this week that 11 contractors with signature gathering companies are facing “forgery and forgery-related charges.”

The allegedly forged signatures were largely captured during the signature verification process, charging documents said, and were not included in the counted signatures that allowed candidates to qualify for the ballot.

The individuals charged collected signatures in five of Utah’s 29 counties — Iron, Salt Lake, Tooele, Utah and Washington. Approximately five of the contractors worked with Gathering, Inc., also known as Gather, and the others’ employers were not listed on charging documents.

All 11, according to the charging documents, collected signatures during the 2024 primary election cycle.

Nearly 60 candidates in Utah contests — from the gubernatorial race, to congressional races, to state legislative races — submitted signature petitions for verification last election cycle. In Utah, candidates can either qualify for the ballot by gathering a certain number of signatures from members of their party, the volume varying by the office, or being chosen by party delegates.

Gather owner Tanner Leatham estimated five to six campaigns that used his company’s services were impacted.

Among Gather’s customers is Gov. Spencer Cox, whose campaign spent $147,000 on signature gathering, according to financial disclosures.

The newly elected Brown also used a signature petition to qualify for the primary ballot, although he worked with a company called In the Field.

According to charging documents, one contractor admitted to signing some voters’ signatures without their permission “so he could make more money.” Charged contractors frequently had spouses or other family members sign for an individual, something one contractor told an investigator he did to “kill two birds with one stone.”

Leatham said all of Gather’s contractors were trained on Utah’s laws around signature gathering, and the company will continue to provide that training for the hundreds of contractors it hires each election cycle. The short-term job can be difficult, Leatham noted, because it requires going door-to-door in the winter.

“When individuals choose to break the rules we do everything we can to help the state go after these people,” Leatham said in a statement, adding, “These individuals made poor and dishonest choices, completely ignoring the law and their training.”

A statement from the attorney general said the cases were referred to his office by the elections office under Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state auditor’s office and the Washington County clerk’s office.

Utah Auditor Tina Cannon said in a statement Tuesday her office has “been involved in a joint effort with the lieutenant governor’s office related to signature gathering during the 2024 election cycle.”

Last year, the attorney general’s office charged 13 men with falsifying signatures on petitions for Republican candidate Bruce Hough in the 2023 special election to replace retiring Rep. Chris Stewart. Nine of the defendants entered into pleas in abeyance and paid a fine. One plead guilty and was sentenced to three years probation. Two had the charges dismissed. One case remains pending.

Brown’s announcement came days after the end of Utah’s annual legislative session, during which lawmakers passed multiple bills meant to increase transparency around the verification of signatures on candidate petitions.

Sen. Wayne Harper’s SB164 allows poll watchers to observe the signature verification process, mandates an audit of signature comparisons and requires election officers to certify a certain percentage of signatures beyond the threshold. Another, SB53 from Sen. Calvin Musselman, R-West Haven, establishes a process for voters to remove their name from a candidate nomination petition.

From Leatham’s perspective, cases like these show why lawmakers should also reconsider the signature threshold set for candidates — lowering it would limit the reliance on contractors to qualify for the ballot.

In statewide races, candidates have to collect and have verified 28,000 signatures — over a thousand more than the entire population of Farmington.

“It is too difficult and too expensive as it is right now,” Leatham wrote in an email. “Lowering the threshold of signatures will make it easier for candidates to use friends, family and volunteers to collect signatures. We need more candidates on the ballot not less, too many races go uncontested year after year.”

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Robert Gehrke contributed to this report.

KANSAS CITY — Interim University of Utah basketball coach Josh Eilert will never forget his first impressions last summer of Rice transfer Keanu Dawes.

Suffice it to say, it wasn’t a great one.

But the 6-foot-9 sophomore forward from Houston, who had transferred in from Rice, slowly changed Eilert’s mind with his steady growth and dedication to improvement.

It reached a pinnacle — for Eilert, anyway — on Tuesday night at T-Mobile Center, as Dawes put together the best game of his two-year college career on an otherwise forgettable outing for the Utes in the first round of the Big 12 tournament.

Getting his first start in a Runnin’ Utes uniform, Dawes posted a double-double — 21 points and 15 rebounds — but it wasn’t enough as Utah fell 87-72 to Central Florida in its first-ever Big 12 tournament game.

“KD is a special player. I will never forget coming into the program and thinking — questioning KD’s value,” said Eilert, who will now give way to permanent coach Alex Jensen if the Utes choose not to participate in a postseason event.

“He has just continued to improve each and every day. He has got the right mindset. He’s got that growth mindset in so many ways. He doesn’t force the game, but he is playing with so much more force than he did when I first got here,” Eilert continued.

Dawes started in the place of junior forward Ezra Ausar, who sustained a knee injury in the 85-74 loss at BYU on Saturday and was not able to go. Ausar had 20 points in Utah’s 76-72 loss at UCF on Feb. 23 and was clearly missed.

“We were monitoring the situation. (Ausar) kinda got his knee buckled up there in Provo, and so they did an MRI on him late that night,” Eilert said. “We were trying to work through that, night and day, 24-7, we were trying to get him ready, but he just wasn’t quite there yet. So we were hoping to get through this first game and have him for tomorrow.”

Utah started as if it planned to meet Kansas on Wednesday, instead of UCF, in a second-round game. Four of Utah’s first five field goals were dunks, and the Utes rolled out to a 21-9 lead.

But the Utes stopped attacking the rim late in the second half, and then didn’t put up much of a fight in the final 20 minutes as UCF pulled away, similar to the way BYU dominated the second half three nights ago in Provo.

Utah (16-16) finished with a whopping 12 dunks, but ultimately frostiness from beyond the arc doomed it to the loss.

Not having Ausar “certainly played an impact because he has played really good basketball for us. Probably our leading scorer, I would imagine, our last five games,” Eilert said. “So not having him have that force at the rim and put that pressure on the rim, that hurt us.”

Dawes was almost able to make up for the loss singlehandedly. The nephew of former BYU center Derek Dawes was 8 of 13 from the field and 5 of 6 from the free-throw line. The Utes won the rebounding battle 40-35.

Where does the performance rank in Dawes’ college career?

“I would say it is definitely up there but at the same time we didn’t really win, so in my opinion it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “There’s not really much to say. We didn’t win.”

UCF coach Johnny Dawkins acknowledged that Ausar not playing “hurt them” and was “a big miss for them,” but wasn’t surprised that Dawes filled in admirably.

“He’s been a really good player in college basketball for a number of years. He is very active. He rebounds the ball very well, especially offensive rebounding. He finishes well around the basket. He understands how to play,” Dawkins said.

Utah’s first taste of the Big 12 men’s basketball tournament ended up being sour.

The No. 11 seed Runnin’ Utes couldn’t hold on to an early double-digit lead as hot-shooting No. 14 seed UCF beat Utah 87-72 in the nightcap of Tuesday’s first round action.

3 takeaways

3-point shooting flipped the game for the Knights. Neither team was able to get much going from 3-point range early in the contest, as Utah missed its first 10 from long range and UCF started 1 of 8.

The Utes built a 21-9 lead but the Knights started to cut into that deficit with some hot 3-point shooting, as UCF ended the first half making 6 of 10, including one just before the halftime buzzer to make it 40-39 going into the break.

The Knights ended up making 10 of 24 3-pointers, while the Utes were 4 of 26.

Keyshawn Hall scored a team-high 23 points for UCF, while Darius Johnson added 20 and Jordan Ivy-Curry had 15 while making three 3-pointers.

The Knights put the game away early in the second half.

The second half couldn’t have started much worse for Utah. After both teams hit field goals in the first 1:10, the Knights went on a 24-3 run to build a 20-point lead.

UCF started the second half shooting 10 of 12 from the floor, while the Utes missed 10 straight field goals at one point.

By the time Keanu Dawes made 1 of 2 free throws, the Utes had gone more than four minutes without a score.

Scoring droughts have become a bane for Utah in the back half of conference play, including in its loss last Saturday at BYU when the Utes only trailed by four at halftime but trailed by as many as 19 in the second half.

This time, the Knights’ early second-half dominance built a big enough cushion for them to cruise to the win, even after a 15-4 run for the Utes briefly made it a single-digit deficit.

Keanu Dawes led Utah’s paint attack. Dawes was a bright spot on a difficult night for Utah, as he made his first start this season with Ezra Ausar missing the game due to injury.

Dawes had 10 first-half rebounds and ended the night with a career-high 21 boards while adding a career-high 15 points.

The taller Utes took advantage of their size inside in the first half, going into the break with a 28-6 edge in points in the paint. UCF ended up cutting that to a 42-26 advantage by game’s end.

Utah won the rebounding edge at 40-35, including 18-8 on the offensive glass.

A mom was arrested after she took her 2½-month-old into the bath with her and the infant died, deputies in Utah said.

The mom, who deputies said admitted to “a history of falling asleep in the bath for hours,” put the baby on her lap in the tub and was later awakened by an older child worried about the infant “being face down” in the water, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office said in a March 10 news release posted on Facebook.

First responders “attempted (life) saving care” on the 2½-month-old at the Eagle Mountain home, “but after extensive effort,” the baby was pronounced dead, deputies said.

The mom was arrested on suspicion of negligent homicide, per the release.

The mom told detectives that she drank “a large amount of alcohol” the evening of March 6, “and then decided to take a bath in the late hours of the night,” deputies said.

She took the infant with her, at first putting the baby in a bouncy chair by the tub, deputies said.

Then, she told detectives, she put the baby on her lap, “just above the water line,” according to deputies.

An older child woke her up about two hours later, “concerned about the (baby) being face down in the bath water and partially under (the mom’s) knee,” deputies said.

The baby wasn’t breathing, deputies said.

The mom picked up the baby while the older child ran to other family members for help, according to deputies.

Eagle Mountain is about a 40-mile drive south from Salt Lake City.

Sara Schilling covers real-time news for McClatchy. She is a graduate of Seattle Pacific University, where she studied communications and sociology. Previously, she reported for newspapers including the Tri-City Herald and The (Tacoma) News Tribune.