No, Utah Did Not Approve a 62 Square Mile Data Centre — The Real Project Is Far Smaller

A claim circulating on social media says Utah approved a 62 square mile data centre campus — the largest in US history. The core of the story is real: Utah did approve a significant data centre development. But the 62 square mile figure is almost certainly wrong, and by a staggering margin.

Here is the problem with the number. Sixty-two square miles equals roughly 39,680 acres. For context, that is larger than many American cities. Data Centre Dynamics, which closely covers the industry, notes that even the biggest hyperscale campuses in the world are measured in hundreds of acres — not tens of thousands. No credible outlet, including Reuters or AP News, has confirmed any project approaching this size anywhere in the US.

The most likely explanation, flagged by Snopes in its analysis of similar viral claims, is a unit error. Someone may have misread square feet as square miles, or inflated an acreage figure, and the mistake then travelled unchecked across social platforms. A project that is genuinely large and newsworthy becomes something almost incomprehensibly vast — and that version is the one that gets shared.

To be fair to the claim: Utah's Governor's Office has confirmed the state is actively courting large-scale data centre investment, and the approved project is real and significant. Concerns about land use, water consumption, and energy demands from these facilities are also legitimate and worth scrutiny. The problem is not the underlying story — it is the number attached to it.

This kind of exaggeration spreads because it feels like it fits a pattern people already believe in. When a figure sounds outrageous but confirms your existing suspicions about Big Tech, it is easy to share without checking. The tell here is the unit: any time a data centre is described in square miles rather than acres or square feet, that is a red flag worth pausing on.