Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox outlined his "Built Here" agenda at Silicon Slopes Summit 2025, emphasizing people, place, and prosperity. He highlighted priorities like housing, energy, and community-building, urging collaboration to sustain Utah's growth and innovation leadership.
Now that Silicon Slopes Summit 2025 has come to an end, we highlight one of its key speakers, Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox. Having been inaugurated only the week prior on January 6th, Governor Cox sat down and explained to Summit attendees his plans for the next four years.
Cox opened by talking about what his administration’s agenda is and how they worked on it before his inauguration. “As we were preparing for a second term, we sat down with our teams, a lot of external stakeholders who are some of the smartest people in the world, to get feedback about where we are as a state and where we should be headed. We came together with a plan. The title of it is ‘Built Here,’ and it focuses on three different areas: people, place, and prosperity.”
Governor Cox continued, “We’re trying to understand what are the strengths of Utah. What are some of our weaknesses? Where can we do better? By focusing on people and making sure that we're caring about our most vulnerable, we're lifting people out of poverty. We want to focus on place. We know we need more buildings. We need more homes. We need more energy. Then, the prosperity piece is something that I think both major parties have lacked a true prosperity agenda, but that's where we were looking at education. How can we get out of this zero-sum mindset that both political parties beset and really focus on an abundance and prosperity agenda?”
Governor Cox described how Utah has already been working on this plan. “Fortunately, Utah is an outlier in so many good ways. We are still builders. We have a builders mindset. That's what we're here celebrating with Silicon Slopes, kind of this entrepreneurial mindset that's been so important.” He then added, “And so it is about physically building; it's about building homes, right? We know we need more supply of homes. It's about building energy. We built energy production plants in the 60s and 70s across the United States. In about a 10-year period, we built about 130 nuclear plants, and we built about three since then. We did that in 10 years, and now it takes at least 10 years to get approval actually to build one of those facilities. But it's also about building institutions. It's about building families. It's about building communities. It's about all of those things that will help us continue to prosper and succeed in the future.”
On why he has is placing so much urgency on energy and housing, Cox elaborated, “We've talked a lot as a country about inflation. We just had an election where inflation played a major role in people's decisions, and we saw a shift to the right.” He sees housing is still the most pressing issue to him, “It's happening everywhere, not just in the United States but lots of countries. In Canada, housing is an issue. The UK housing is an issue, but in places with more success and where the economy has been better, like Utah and the Intermountain West, we've seen housing prices increase at an unsustainable rate. It's harder and harder for not just young people but anybody to buy a home. This is pure economics 101:it is supply and demand. When demand is high, supply is low, and prices go up. So we can either decrease demand, which is what the federal government is doing by raising interest rates, which isn't really decreasing demand; it's just artificial demand destruction, or we can build more houses.”
He continued, “So many great ideas are happening in the virtual world. And yet, if you want prosperity, if you want energy, for these data centers, for the AI centers in the future that are so important to this industry, if you want a workforce, you need a place to live, and it needs to be able to afford to live there. One of the reasons the Silicon Slopes happened was because Silicon Valley became unattainable for far too many people. That was not the lifestyle they wanted.”
He then added, “It was too expensive, so they found other places like Utah, where we could grow this ecosystem, and we want to keep that advantage, and there's no reason we can't. It is a choice. It will always be a choice. It's all related. If we want to have prosperity in the tech world, we need prosperity in the other phases of the world and other industries. We're fortunate to do that. By virtually every metric, Utah is leading the nation. We have a very diverse economy, and it is one of the fastest-growing economies in the country. We led the nation in GDP growth over the last ten years.”
Governor Cox closed out his speech offering advice to the entrepreneurs at Summit. “My advice is to follow your dreams. Build, do it. We want to make sure that Utah is the best place in the world for you to do that. This means the government getting out of the way and letting you do your thing, letting you build; that's our ethos. We care about that. But the second thing is that Utah's government doesn't make Utah unique or special. It's the people that live here. It's social capital. It is about our connections in our communities, where we lift each other up and improve each other. Government cannot solve all of our problems; it was never designed to solve them.
Continuing, Gov. Cox said, "What makes Utah special is that we lead the nation in charitable giving every year, and we lead the nation in volunteering every year, and this is where we need you. This is not something you just do when you have your billion-dollar exit, although we hope you will do it then, too. This is something you do at every step along the way. You build your neighborhood, you build your community, you give back, and you take care of your employees. We take care of each other. That's who we are, and that's what makes Utah different and unique and special, and it's what separates us from Silicon Valley. I'm just here to tell you that if we want Utah to stay unique, if we want Utah to stay the best place in the world, to live and play and raise a family and build a business, we have to take care of each other, and we need your help at doing that.”
For more information, visit Governor Cox.