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We need to talk about the Colorado River. It feels like all I can think about as someone who lives in one of the seven states that depend on this 1,450-mile body of water.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, many Tribal Nations, and Mexico rely on the river for our essential needs, including power and agriculture. The Colorado River supplies drinking water to about 40 million people.
More than 100 years ago, these seven states signed an agreement giving them each an equal share of the water called the Colorado River Compact, 1922. Back then, leaders couldn’t have imagined the water crisis of our times.
Since 2000, the entire region has experiences extreme drought and water use has surpassed the river’s annual supply by an average of 1 million acre-feet per year, which is nearly 326 billion gallons of water.
To understand that volume of water, consider that New York City is often cited as using about 1 billion gallons a day for its 8.3 million residents, so that’s almost a year’s worth of water for the largest city in the U.S.
This water shortage has had a huge impact on the whole area, including reduced hydropower generation and historically very low water levels in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the largest reservoirs in the system. In August, these reservoirs hit their lowest water levels since they were first filled, and both sit at less than 30 percent full.
Amid these historic strains on the water due to drought (less snowpack) and changing weather, the basin states that share the water cannot agree on new rules for sharing it.
Unelected officials who serve as representatives to each governor have negotiated for the last three years on all matters related to the river water but failed to come to an agreement.
The Federal Government Stepped In…
In late August, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation stepped in and released a two-year plan for the Colorado River Basin, cutting supplies to the lower basin states (California, Nevada, and Arizona) by more than 20 percent. Further slashes could double later this decade, according to the plan signed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“What’s clear after seeing the projections for reservoir elevations over the next couple of years is that the buffer the Colorado River reservoirs provided over the last many decades is gone,” Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director for the Audubon Society, told the Colorado Sun. “There is real risk for the cities, farmers and ranchers, Tribes, and the entire natural world that depends on the Colorado River.”
As you can imagine, these mandated water reductions could have a devastating impact on state economies.
“I will continue making that case to the federal government and fighting relentlessly to protect Arizona’s fair share of the Colorado River so our families can feel confident we will have the water we need to turn on the taps, nourish our crops, and grow our economy well into the future,” Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs said in a statement.
What The New Water Plan Doesn’t See
It’s that piece of growing the economy that I believe is the blind spot in this new plan for the Colorado River.
It doesn’t mention data centers. Regulators built a rationing plan for a shrinking-but-vital water supply, while ignoring one of its fastest-growing new users.
The fight in the Grand Canyon State has just begun. In late August, Arizona attorney General Kris Mayes called for a statewide pause on the approval and construction of new data centers, particularly hyperscale AI projects, asking state lawmakers and Gov. Hobbs to pass a moratorium.
“The only sane thing to do is to pause the approval of new data centers,” she said in a written statement. “Data centers are power- and water-intensive, and Arizona is challenged on both fronts right now.”
I’ve received more than 230 reports from Arizona, and Tucson is one of the top reporting cities on my self-reported AI Data Center Map.
Lessons from Project Blue
Last year, residents began to learn about “Project Blue” a proposed data center that was set to be built on land near the Pima County Fairgrounds on the southeast side of Tucson. The media outlet AZ Luminaria first reported that Amazon Web Services is behind the project.
The company building the project is Beale Infrastructure headquartered in San Francisco.
The project was described on the Pima County Economic Development website as “an unprecedented $3.6 billion economic development opportunity for the county, strengthening the tax base, and helping fund major energy infrastructure improvements with a commitment to water stewardship to facilitate long-term, sustainable growth.”
Community members in Pima County and Tucson didn’t buy it. Last year, they began to mobilize and identify the scope of the threats, learning about nondisclosure agreements signed by the city and county as many as three years before that withheld critical information.
They became incredibly vocal and passionate in their resistance to building a large-scale data center in the desert. At public hearings, they expressed concerns about water, natural resources, extreme heat, government surveillance, public health, and property values.
“Eventually, we came to understand that Project Blue would require the energy equivalent of the entire city of Tucson to power it at full build,” wrote Maria Renée in an article about the “Not One Drop” campaign. “Water use would total nearly 10 million gallons per day for cooling purposes alone, without including the additional amount needed for its lengthy construction phase.”
You can learn more about the work of the No Desert Data Center Coalition here.
The project has not been stopped entirely, but the opposition has had some wins.
On August 6, 2025, the Tucson City Council voted 7-0 to reject annexing the site and to end negotiations on a development agreement, which cut off Project Blue’s access to Tucson’s water and city services. The City Council received a standing ovation.
That vote stopped the city’s involvement in Project Blue, but the project kept moving at the county level.
Pima County’s Board of Supervisors had already voted 3-2 in June 2025 to rezone the land and approved selling 290 acres to Beale Infrastructure, and three of the five supervisors said afterward they had no legal path to reverse that vote even if they wanted to. The land sale closed on Christmas Eve 2025.
Without access to the city’s water, the company switched Project Blue to a closed-loop, air-based cooling system, according to reporting in the Tucson Sentinel. Funny, how they didn’t start with that system in their proposal.
Construction for the project began in April 2026. The No Desert Data Center Coalition showed up, physically blocking vehicles from leaving the construction site, according to KOLD News 13.
In May 2026, the city discovered that a Project Blue contractor, Ames Construction, had improperly tapped a Tucson Water meter to control construction dust and revoked it. It happened again in August, and the city revoked another meter and demanded the developer return two acre-feet of water it had taken.
Tucson has adopted new regulations for large water users but stopped short of the full moratorium residents want.
Just two days ago, the Pima County Health Department, in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University researcher, released a comprehensive health impact study showing potential public health risks large-scale data center projects. Those concerns include decreasing air quality, increased water consumption, and rising energy bills, which could have a huge impact on the lower median household income of most residents in the county as compared with the rest of the state and the country.
The report details how data center cooling systems and backup generators continuously generate heat. The team cited a global study which found thermal plumes from data centers can extend 6 miles, raising ambient air and surface temperatures between 4 and 16 degrees Fahrenheit.
The department did not have the resources to do a site-specific study for Project Blue but instead, they were directed by the board to do a more general, county-wide assessment.
But the report did mention Project Blue, and its planned water consumption and management. The facility plans to use more than 140 million gallons of reclaimed water per year for on-site cooling, and some of it will have to be discharged and refilled. That water could risk contaminating local groundwater supplies with PFAS contaminants or refrigerants, according to the study authors.
“In a region where Tucson Water delivers 30 billion gallons of potable water annually to around 722,000 customers, even a single new industrial user could appreciably shift demand patterns and impact pricing, supply infrastructure, and sustainability,” the authors wrote.
As of this writing, Project Blue is in an active construction phase, and that’s just one project.
The Bigger Picture
Numbers vary but Arizona has at least 70 total data center facilities with more than 40 already operational and another 30 under construction or under proposal.
What about the other six states that sit in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin facing massive shortages to their water supply?
I’m hearing from community members in many of these states, including Project Jupiter a 1,400-acre monstrosity in the New Mexico desert with closed-door committee approvals. The proposed 330-megawatt data center in California’s Imperial Valley promised not to use Colorado River water but now wants 260 million gallons a year. Read more about that here.
Whatever is happening in your state or locality, there’s still time to make a difference. I don’t think the pushback in Tucson is a failure, but an honest look at what can happen when people show up in numbers and speak up about their concerns.
In July, I heard from a community member in Pahrump, Nevada, with concerns for her small town facing three massive data center proposals. She said that the county commissioner was adamant that data centers were a good thing. By late August, the Nye County Board of Commissioners voted to completely ban data centers, becoming the first municipality in Nevada to outright ban data centers.
This kind of advocacy requires a certain amount of luck—in terms of your elected officials and their ability to scrutinize these projects. But the more we talk about wins and losses, the more we all learn. I have mayors, state representatives, and city council members emailing me almost as often as community members also trying to figure out how to handle these massive changes to our landscape from the natural world and the Tech world.
Accountability is something communities must build for themselves. One records request at a time. One county meeting at a time. One pause or ban enacted at a time.
Keep reading, researching, and showing up. We are stronger together.
A Poem
I’d like to close with a few lines from a poem by Natalie Diaz called The First Water Is the Body about the Colorado River.
How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?
~
The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one—to the body, to the water—we do to the other.
~
Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.
And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?
What are your thoughts about the new Colorado River plan and the boom of hyperscale data centers in the desert?
We really can not AFFORD to have data centers use our water! I just read another report that says the Gunnison river may be dry by October! This has to STOP!
I believe the only thing to do now is NOT allow DCs. There needs to be a ban on NEW DCs and some sort of "watch" on resources used by existing ones.
The owners/developers keep talking about how technology will develop so resource needs will drop significantly. Well, those innovations need to come before any new DCs.
Doing what we've been doing will literally place the world in a huge Tragedy of the Commons situation. It's suicidal.