Rendering of the proposed $10 billion Imperial Valley Computer Manufactoring data center near Imperial, Ca. A Superior Court judge has overturned the county approvals for the project and ordered the development to undergo environmental review as a whole.
There is a data center proposed for California’s Imperial Valley that would use as much as 287 million gallons of Colorado River water a year.
The proposed Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing project would occupy about 75 acres near the City of Imperial. The building itself would cover roughly 950,000 square feet.
But the building is almost the least interesting part.
The project calls for 330 megawatts of electrical capacity, an 862-megawatt-hour battery system, four water tanks holding 500,000 gallons apiece, and 132 natural-gas generators.
One hundred and thirty-two.
At some point you stop describing a computer facility and start describing an industrial power plant with servers attached.
And now a California judge has said the public might actually want to know what all of this will do before somebody starts grading the dirt.
Imperial County Superior Court Judge L. Brooks Anderholt has overturned county approvals that allowed the project to move forward without a full environmental review.
The ruling makes final a tentative decision Anderholt issued earlier.
His problem was fairly straightforward.
The environmental review used for the property dated to 2017. What is proposed today bears little resemblance to what was contemplated then.
The old review didn’t examine a 330-megawatt data center. It didn’t examine the enormous battery installation. It didn’t examine the cooling and water systems. And it didn’t examine 132 natural-gas generators.
Yet the project had been moving through the approval process by treating various pieces separately.
California has a wonderfully bureaucratic term for what the judge said you cannot do: segmentation.
Anderholt ruled that Imperial County had “prejudicially abused its discretion” by approving the project without reviewing the environmental consequences of the development as a whole.
That sends the project back through California’s environmental review process and could require a full Environmental Impact Report before construction proceeds.
Which brings us to the water.
Just a little Colorado River water
Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing has separately sought about 880 acre-feet of water annually from the Imperial Irrigation District.
That is roughly 287 million gallons a year.
The developer points out that this represents a tiny fraction of the irrigation district’s enormous Colorado River allocation. It has also compared the amount to the water consumed by roughly 160 acres of farmland.
Both statements can be true.
It is still 287 million gallons of Colorado River water.
The Imperial Valley happens to sit beside one of the more remarkable water arrangements in the American West.
It is desert.
Drive through it and you see fields of alfalfa, lettuce and other crops stretching across land that would otherwise be brown. That agriculture exists because water is carried into the valley from the Colorado River.
The Imperial Irrigation District holds the largest single entitlement to Colorado River water.
And the Colorado is not exactly suffering from an excess-water problem.
Seven states, Mexico, farmers, tribes and tens of millions of people depend upon a river that has been asked to provide more water than nature reliably puts into it.
Now comes artificial intelligence.
Not just in Imperial County.
Across America, enormous data centers are being proposed in places where developers can find three increasingly valuable things: land, electricity and water.
The industry’s preferred description is “infrastructure.”
Fair enough.
So are dams.
The factory behind the cloud
For years we were encouraged to think of computing as something almost weightless.
Your photographs went into “the cloud.”
Your email went into “the cloud.”
Artificial intelligence somehow lived in “the cloud.”
It sounded pleasantly meteorological.
Nobody mentioned the four half-million-gallon water tanks.
Or the 132 gas generators.
Or the 330 megawatts.
AI has finally made the physical reality of computing too large to hide behind the language.
These aren’t server closets.
They are factories.
They consume industrial quantities of electricity. They require transmission lines, substations and backup generation. Some require substantial quantities of water for cooling. They bring diesel or natural-gas emissions, battery fire risks, traffic, noise and enormous electrical loads into communities that may never have contemplated hosting anything remotely this large.
That doesn’t make data centers inherently bad.
It makes them industrial developments.
And industrial developments traditionally come with an inconvenient expectation:
You tell the people living nearby what you’re building.
You tell them how much electricity it will use.
You tell them how much water it will consume.
You tell them what will come out of the exhaust stacks.
And then somebody other than the developer gets to check the arithmetic.
That is essentially what Judge Anderholt has ordered Imperial County to do.
The larger fight
There is still another lawsuit involving the project.
I wrote earlier about the project’s separate fight with the Imperial Irrigation District over its request for those 880 acre-feet of Colorado River water. That fight isn’t over.
That case is separate from this environmental ruling.
Which means the Imperial Valley project has managed to land in two of the arguments that are beginning to follow AI data centers across the country.
Who supplies the electricity?
And who supplies the water?
Those questions are going to become harder to dismiss as data centers grow from 50-megawatt projects to 300-megawatt projects and then to campuses measured in gigawatts.
The technology industry likes to talk about artificial intelligence as though it exists somewhere beyond the physical world.
It doesn’t.
AI lives in buildings.
Those buildings sit on land.
They consume electricity.
Some consume enormous amounts of water.
And somebody lives next door.
In Imperial County, a judge has decided those people deserve to know what is being built before the bulldozers arrive.
That seems a remarkably old-fashioned idea.
It may also be the future.