“A Very Bad Deal”: How local organizing halted a massive data center development — for now.

In Pima County, Arizona, three miles north of Tucson at the heart of the Sonoran Desert, there is a 290 acre fenced-off plot of parched land, dotted with cacti and desert sagebrush. This is the proposed site for “Project Blue,” a large data center development requiring vast amounts of already-scare water.

Since early June, when the Tucson community first heard about the proposed project, local activists have rallied to reject the development. As data center developments proliferate across the U.S, Tucson activists’ mixed success has illustrated the importance — and limitations — of local-level organizing.

It’s not entirely surprising that Beale Infrastructure, the Project Blue developer, proposed Pima County as the development site, despite the lack of water in the surrounding desert. Data Centers are being constructed wherever there is space. Over 60 new data centers are expected to be completed by the end of 2025, according to ABI Research. 

The rise of these developments has been insidious. When the Tucson community first heard about Project Blue, very little information about the proposal was publicly available. Beale Infrastructure had drafted a convoluted land acquisition deal which drew an unusually large public crowd to the Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting on June 17. In a contentious 3-2 vote, the board approved the deal. 

“A lot of community members that were there were pretty baffled.” Angel Breault, a Tucson-based conservation advocate, said. Breault was working that morning and wasn’t able to attend the meeting. Instead, he joined a flurry of group chats and Signal threads created in response to the board’s decision. 

The swiftness of the decision, and the murkiness regarding what exactly had been decided upon, prompted even swifter community organization. 

Less than three days after the County Board meeting, community members made plans via Signal to connect at an informal “walk and talk” event, hosted by a pre-existing conservation group, the Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition (TBOSC). Attendees circled up, introduced themselves, and started discussing how to uncover details about Project Blue and combat the development. Breault, who is an organizer with TBOSC, describes this talking circle as the semi-formal inception of the No Desert Data Center Coalition (NDDC). 

The nascent coalition quickly launched a rigorous social media campaign and organized additional gatherings. Because Beale Infrastructure still needed the final approval of the Tucson City Council, the NDDC encouraged community members to reach out to their council members and attend all Project Blue information meetings, which they dubbed “Propaganda Meetings.”  A lot of the coalition’s work involved extracting facts about Project Blue from the Pima County Supervisors, all of whom had signed Beale Infrastructure’s nondisclosure agreements.  

As the NDDC uncovered more information about the development, opposition increased. At public meetings, community members raised concerns ranging from the secrecy of the project to how the development would impact Tucson’s immigrant communities — ICE relies on Amazon Web Storage (AWS), which had been linked to Project Blue, for data storage and computational technology. Many community members were also concerned about energy usage; the development would require 600 megawatts of electricity per year, over a fifth of Tucson's electric capacity. Most of that electricity – over 80%, according to Tucson Electric Power — would come from non-renewable sources. Tucson residents would be footing the cost of that energy in their electricity bills.  

On August 8th, 52 days after the County Board of Supervisors land annexation vote, the Tucson City Council voted unanimously against Project Blue, halting the data center development. The decision was not only a political win for the community, it was a display of functional, old-fashioned democracy. Community members made a demand and their representatives listened. Beale Infrastructure and AWS had lost to the remarkably potent power of local organizing.

But less than three weeks later, on August 26th, Beale Infrastructure confirmed to the Arizona Luminaria that the company was attempting to move forward with the data center development, ignoring Tucson City Council’s unanimous vote against the project. 

The NDDC immediately responded on Instagram: “Buckle up! We had a feeling this wasn’t over and we were right! NDDC is still here with more conviction than ever.”

The coalition has since continued to organize against Project Blue. “We are working really hard on our messaging and encouraging people to present alternative nature-based visions for economic development so that we can start championing an alternative to this deal that's been presented to us,” Breault said.

Even though Breault remains hopeful, Run On Climate (ROC) Policy Director Quinton Zondervan warns that data center development could become a game of cat and mouse. Because there are currently no incentives for development companies to implement efficiency measures, in the face of meaningful backlash from organizations like the NDDC, companies can simply pivot and build elsewhere. “They find places that are the least regulated, the least organized, and the most desperate for economic development,” Zondervan said. “It’s good old classic extraction capitalism.”

This doesn’t have to be the case. Sudhanshu Jain, Santa Clara city councilmember and a member of ROC’s Local Climate Policy Network, has led the charge in creating stringent requirements for data center developers — and they’ve been complying.

Since 2023, five new data centers have been constructed in Santa Clara and, adhering to city regulations, using a combination of carbon offsets and carbon-free electricity, all five of them are carbon-neutral facilities. 

According to Jain, corporations like AWS have the financial flexibility to work with the communities where they are developing in order to make their data centers more sustainable. “These guys are so freaking rich, they can pay for carbon-free electricity," he said. 

It is a matter of rejecting developers’ initial, often exploitative proposals. “A deal that does not consider your environmental or public health is a very bad deal,” Breault said.  

In order to reject or regulate data centers, local communities must stay one step ahead of developers. To do so, the No Desert Data Center Coalition advises communities to identify what their demands are. Some communities, like Pima County, may attempt to reject developments outright, while others may prefer to establish development regulations. Zondervan suggests that all communities prepare a policy plan.

According to Peter Jarka-Sellers, a Policy Associate at ROC, the ROC policy team is working to develop a suite of these regulatory policy plans that local-level governments can implement when presented with new data center developments. These include implementing efficiency measures through zoning by limiting the amount of water or electricity that new developments can use.  

ROC offers free, customized assistance to communities that are being impacted by data center developments or looking to establish regulatory policies. The key is having these policies ready to go in advance, because, as Zondervan points out, data center proposals are rapidly cropping up in communities across the country. 

“It's not a Tucson problem. It's an everybody problem. People need to get ready. They need to decide now if they want [data centers] or not and under what conditions they would consider it. They need to turn those conditions into regulations because otherwise, you might be faced with a vote tomorrow and your city council might not have gotten the message.”