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Leah Bowers

Leah Bowers

Leah Bowers is a Utah, Politics and the West reporter at the Deseret News.

Oct 16, 2026

19:26
Right
19:26
... looking down the pipe.
19:27
It's supposed to be coming online in 2028, and that's gonna be near Milford, kind of in southwestern Utah, like you said.
19:34
And Fervo Energy, which is the developer, announced a 396 megawatt power purchase agreement with Google, and that was on September 1st.
19:43
So Google spends money, and Fervo says, "We'll give you our energy in the future" and-
20:50
Hmm
20:50
... and we know California has that kind of mandate where they want, um, clean energy, so they're going to all these different sources across the country to get it.
20:59
So they started a contract with Fervo that includes phase one, which is about 100 megawatts of power, and much of phase two, which is about 400 megawatts of power.
1:02
Right
1:02
... looking down the pipe.
1:04
It's supposed to be coming online in 2028, and that's gonna be near Milford, kind of in southwestern Utah, like you said.
1:10
And Fervo Energy, which is the developer, announced a 396 megawatt power purchase agreement with Google, and that was on September 1st.
1:19
So Google spends money, and Fervo says, "We'll give you our energy in the future."
2:27
... and we know California has that kind of mandate where they want, um, clean energy, so they're going to all these different sources across the country to get it.
2:36
So they started a contract with Fervo that includes phase one, which is about 100 megawatts of power, and much of phase two, which is about 400 megawatts of power.
3:27
Is it about China or is it about data centers in general? I mean, we know from COVID, right, there was so much negativity about China.
3:37
Right.
3:37
And it's interesting.
3:38
I think it's a mix of both.
3:40
I was able to talk to Aaron Starks, who does a lot of work with, you know, aerospace and defense organization with 47G is the name of his company.
3:51
And he talked to me a little bit about what data centers actually do in the sense of this race, this AI race with China.
4:00
And he said the four capabilities of AI are chips, data centers, electricity, and talent.

5 MINS LATER

9:23
Does the poll try to get to kind of the bottom of that we use our phones all the time and we need data? That's why we need data centers at all? I mean, is there this sort of acknowledgement by Utahns that, yeah, we may need these things, but we still don't want them?

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