By McKenzie Romero | Editor
Like many other states, Utah gives tax breaks to data centers that are built within its borders.
It’s also among 14 states that don’t report how much tax revenue is lost — because a 2009 state law doesn’t require that the data be collected.
In today’s Dispatch we look at the history and possible future for Utah’s data center tax breaks, the ice hiding in Timpanogos Rock Glacier, and how a Washington town is using prescribed burns to reduce wildfire risk.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure. For any government policy, transparency and accountability is of utmost importance.” — Kristian Fors, analyst with the Libertas Institute think tank, on Utah’s laws that don’t require data collection about tax breaks for data centers.
Construction continues on the new QTS data center in Eagle Mountain on Friday, April 17, 2026. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
UTAH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM PROJECT
By Sydnee Chapman
Utah isn’t alone in its opaque approach to sales and use tax exemptions for data centers. A report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit which focuses on corporate and government accountability, found that other states reported losing between $830,000 and $1.9 billion in 2025 to similar tax breaks, with larger losses projected for this year and beyond.
Kasia Tarczynska, who authored the report, said many states created the exemptions based on the smaller-scale data centers that existed 10 to 15 years ago but that those programs have skyrocketed in the past few years due to artificial intelligence deployment.
Mt. Timpanogos rock glacier. (Photo by Bronson Cvijanovich)
By Alixel Cabrera
With a novel 3D technique, a University of Utah team has brought to light the unaccounted masses of ice hidden at the Timpanogos Rock Glacier, finding both a good measurement of how much ice it contains, and also how the rock glacier located near Salt Lake City and Provo formed.
The Timpanogos Rock Glacier stores 1.5 million cubic meters of ice, the University of Utah says. That’s enough frozen water to fill 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The number is also similar to the volume of the largest pyramid in Giza, Egypt, said Bronson Cvijanovich, a former graduate student in the Department of Geology & Geophysics.
A crew member hoses down vegetation to keep a prescribed fire from spreading outside of a designated parcel near Roslyn, Washington. (Photo by Alex Brown/Stateline)
STATELINE
By Alex Brown
Francisco Martinez hefts a canister filled with a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline. A tongue of flame dances above the nozzle. He tips the drip torch forward and a stream of blazing liquid races across the forest floor.
He is part of a team conducting a prescribed burn on a forested ridge in central Washington, above a small town, Roslyn, that was nearly wiped out by a wildfire just a few years ago. The specter of wildfire is one that increasingly haunts hundreds of communities throughout the West, and the work here could point them toward a new model of living with fire.
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