Water for coolant is nearly, if not 100%, recyclable. It isn’t used up, it is recirculated, so there’s no “massive amounts” of water being “used up.“ Water just has to be available to absorb heat, then allowed to cool again. The amount of time it takes to cool again will in part determine how much water per minute needs to be available for efficient circulation.
The problem is that the local grid will not be able to handle the load, so the plant will have its own massive natural gas-powered electrical generation plant... This is the reason that the company has been buying up water rights in the area.
From Gemini 3.5
“The Power Plant (The Hidden Water Consumer)
Because the local electric grid cannot support a massive 9-gigawatt load, the project plans to generate its own electricity on-site by tapping into the Ruby natural gas pipeline.
Generating 9 gigawatts of power using gas-fired combustion turbines requires an astronomical amount of water just to keep the generators cool and control emissions. According to independent estimates and water impact models published by groups like *Utah Clean Energy*:
* At full buildout, the on-site natural gas power generation is estimated to require anywhere from **2 billion to 16.6 billion gallons of water per year**, depending on the exact type of gas turbines or reciprocating engines they deploy.
* To put that in perspective, 2 billion gallons is enough to fill roughly 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
* The upper estimates represent enough water to support the basic annual needs of more than **20,000 average Utah households**.
### Why This Has Sparked a Local Crisis
The developers have quietly been trying to line up these water rights. Public records show they are looking to secure roughly **3,000 acre-feet of on-site water rights** and have another **10,000 acre-feet under contract** from the nearby town of Snowville.
The core of the outrage in Utah is *where* this water comes from. The project sits in Box Elder County, right at the northern tip of the **Great Salt Lake watershed**—an ecosystem that is already in active ecological collapse due to severe regional drought and upstream water diversions.
Local environmental groups and hydrogeologists have pointed out that the groundwater pumping required to supply this project is directly tied to the fading Locomotive Springs wetlands, which feed into the Great Salt Lake. By extracting billions of gallons of groundwater to cool a private fossil-fuel power plant for AI, critics argue the project will permanently rob the shrinking lake of the inflows it desperately needs to survive.