The one presentation at this hearing that didn't come from a state agency. USC Marshall's Shon Hiatt lays out the moratorium wave hitting Utah counties, the national cancellation numbers, and how Utah's incentives compare to its neighbors.
Tap a term for a plain-language definition. Everything past this point assumes you know these.
This deck is the only one of the five that reports what's happening at the county level in real time — moratoriums are ordinances, passed county by county, often specifically naming high-impact consumers or qualifying data centers as the thing being paused. The NDA and GRAMA terms matter because Utah's attempt to ban secrecy in these deals failed the same session SB 132 and HB 507 passed.
Every other presentation in this docket came from a Utah state agency with a stake in the outcome. This one didn't — and it's the only one that reports Stratos being delayed, BrightNight being stalled, and Provo rejecting a project outright.
There's no single national threshold for what counts as a data center worth writing a law about. Utah's own rules aren't even consistent with each other:
Nationally, large-load utility thresholds range from 20 MW (proposed in Maine and Iowa) to 100 MW (enacted in Utah and Florida).
For scale: the deck notes a typical AI data center can use about as much electricity as 100,000 homes.
On water, the deck's finding is mixed: liquid cooling adoption remains gradual (about 22% of operators, under 10% of racks), but water use varies enormously across facilities — from Novva's minimal recirculated system to NSA's, which used roughly 120 million gallons over 12 months according to Salt Lake Tribune records requests cited in the deck.
The deck's most reportable finding: six local pauses in ten weeks, none of them driven by state action.
Iron County's moratorium is the same one Case File 3 traced against GOED's Opportunity Zone map and UIPA's Iron Springs/Enoch project area — the state-facilitated zone sits inside the same county that just voted to pause new applications.
The top concerns driving opposition nationally, per the deck's own survey data: noise/light/quality of life (51%), land use and place preservation (43%), water use and hydrology (40%), infrastructure and traffic (34%), and energy/grid capacity (34%). Tax incentives and subsidies rank last among stated concerns, at just 6%.
Thirteen states are considering substantially unwinding their data center tax incentives. Three states paused theirs outright in 2026 (Arizona, Illinois, Ohio), and Minnesota trimmed its exemption while adding a new energy-based fee. Texas's incentive is now estimated at $3.3 billion a year — one of the most expensive tax breaks in the state.
| State | Sales tax | Electricity | Property tax | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Utah | Yes | No | No† | Over 150,000 sq ft; HB 76 water reporting; HB 507 local incentives via zones only from May 2027; county energy tax up to 6%; Gov. Cox EO 2026-03 directs a "Data Center Framework" |
| Nevada | Yes (rate to 2%) | Yes | Up to 75% abated | 50% of construction workers must be NV residents |
| Arizona | Yes | No | No | Exemption paused 3 yrs by statute |
| Idaho | Yes (server equip.) | No | Partial | 2026 law limits consumptive water cooling |
| Wyoming | Yes | Exempt if >$50M | No | Jobs "appropriate to size" |
| Colorado | No incentive | — | — | |
| New Mexico | No incentive | — | — | Regulators rejected a pipeline serving a 2.5 GW campus |
Nationally, 31 states set capital-investment minimums as a condition of incentives; a smaller number require job creation, clawbacks, or sunset dates.
The "No" in Utah's property tax column is only true for a statewide statutory abatement written specifically for data centers — which doesn't exist by that name. It's not true that Utah has no property-tax mechanism a data center can benefit from. Three confirmed, separate examples — and the third is the biggest:
UIPA, statewide: The Utah Inland Port Authority runs fifteen project areas across the state — West Weber, Tooele Valley, Pony Express, Central Utah Agri-Park, Historic Capitol, Mineral Mountains, Iron Springs, Ancient Sky, Golden Spike, Northwest Quadrant, Twenty Wells, Black Gold, Verk Industrial Park, Castle Country, and Skyline Corridor. This isn't one county's exception: UIPA's own recruitment strategy explicitly names "technology and data centers (low water use)" as a favored industry, with post-performance property tax rebates up to 20% of assessed value for 25 years, scaled to capital investment ($15M minimum, up to 20% at $50M+). Any data center locating in any of these fifteen zones can apply.
MIDA: Stratos runs through a MIDA project area, approved by the MIDA board April 24, 2026, and MIDA project areas capture property tax increment the same way UIPA zones do. Our own GRAMA requests to Box Elder County and the Utah Tax Commission are specifically examining whether Stratos's base-year property valuation was set in a way that maximizes that captured increment.
Local RDA/CRA abatement: Meta's Eagle Mountain data center received a documented package including a 100% exemption on personal property and an 80% reduction on real property, structured over a 20-to-40-year framework and granted by local taxing entities.
Ordinary county/city CRA authority, the broadest tool of all: Beyond UIPA, MIDA, and one-off local deals like Meta's, any Utah county or city can create its own Community Reinvestment Area under Title 17C and set its own abatement terms — no state statute, UIPA membership, or MIDA project area required. This isn't hypothetical: Weber County's own CRA record shows the tool in active, general use — the Nordic Village PID (roughly $47 million in property tax redirected over 30–40 years), the Airport Community Reinvestment Project Area (tax increment reduced from 90% to 75%, capped at $17 million over 18 years), and a standing county policy setting a baseline 50%-for-10-years abatement. None of those specific deals is a data center, but they confirm the underlying mechanism — ordinary county CRA authority — is live, general-purpose, and available to any commercial project a county wants to attract, data centers included.
Four different mechanisms, four different administering bodies, all producing the same result a national comparison table built around statewide statutes is structurally prone to miss.
Utah is one of only 11 states nationally with zero jobs/wage conditions attached to its incentives — 23 states require job creation (from 5 jobs in Maryland to 100 in Massachusetts), and at least 11 require those jobs to pay above a wage floor. Utah's median "data center technician" pay ($49,188) and "data center electrical engineer" pay ($134,244) both run below the national medians for those roles ($54,031 and $147,461).