Stratos is a project to be built in Box Elder County, north of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The machine will demand 9 gigawatts of electrical power - more than the total consumption of some countries. All of that energy turns into heat. That is why physicists are saying: daily thermal waste equivalent to 23 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Every day. Indefinitely.

The number isn't a metaphor. Physicist Robert Davis works it out like this: 9 gigawatts from the servers, plus losses from gas generators with 50-55 percent efficiency, gives total thermal waste of around 16 gigawatts. That is the amount of energy released into the atmosphere as heat. And physics has just one rule: the energy that goes in has to come out.

What does that mean for the surroundings? Simulations show a daytime temperature rise of 2.8 degrees Celsius, and a night-time rise of 15.5 degrees. In a valley where the air naturally settles, you get a concentrated „heat island” effect. Existing research on similar facilities has shown that within a radius of a few kilometres, ground temperatures can rise by up to 9 degrees.

Behind the project is Kevin O'Leary, known from Shark Tank. The idea is straightforward: AI centres burn enormous amounts of power, and if you can find a location where you can build without obstacles and secure guaranteed electricity, you're sitting on billions of dollars in profit. Local authorities in Utah are open for business. The question of climate consequences - that isn't on their agenda.

For comparison - the Pantheon project in Topusko, Croatia, will run on a 1 gigawatt capacity. That is nine times smaller than Stratos. The Croatian developers say they will limit the impact through solar production (500 megawatts) and a water-based cooling system. Whether that's a technical miracle or marketing - time will tell.

For the Balkans, this is a two-faced story. On one side, the AI industry brings investment and jobs. On the other - even the Croatian project, nine times smaller than the American one, will have climate consequences that have not yet been fully studied. When Silicon Valley decides AI must grow without limits, the consequences don't stay in California. They get distributed wherever the centres are built.

23 atomic bombs of heat a day. Not in the sense of an explosion - in the sense of energy released into the atmosphere. A civilisation that chooses that path should at least admit what it is doing. For now, everyone is pretending this is „progress” rather than something that demands serious thought. That is the first sign that progress is already being treated like a religion - not to be questioned, only counted.