Season 3 of Electric Futures looks at data centers and the impact they are having on communities. We focus on Imperial Valley where a large data center has been proposed.
I come out of discussions about hyperscale data centers in the Valley with an admiration for the men and women of this region in how they are addressing some of the major challenges of our time with pragmatism, understanding and strong values.
Across the nation, small, rural communities like those in the Valley are holding similar discussions. And it is the window into American democracy that these discussions capture that was perhaps the most surprising experience I had in making Season 3.
Let me explain.
I spent the last 2 years developing NEOM U, a new university to be established in the region of NEOM, Saudi Arabia. NEOM was conceived of as a sustainable region built on wind, solar, pumped hydro, and battery energy storage. How such an economy is to be built was the challenge NEOM was envisioned to tackle.
An example of a commercially viable opportunity is the plan to build a 1.5GW green data center. Data Volt signed agreements with the Saudi government to invest $5B in this facility. This initial investment will build a 300MW data center to be operational by 2028 and the data center is to be powered by wind, solar and battery energy storage.
Of importance to Season 3 of Electric Futures is that data centers in NEOM exist in a climate very similar to southeastern California. Both communities are hotter than blazes in the summer and rather pleasant through the late fall and winter – requiring fleeces for comfort in the evenings. A key difference is that the Imperial Valley has access to the Colorado River as a source of potable water whereas all water used for farming or for industrial purposes in NEOM is derived from desalination. Only advanced cooling technologies not requiring evaporation of water will be deployed in the NEOM data center.
The data center exemplifies the commitment to creating an environmentally sustainable and growing Saudi economy. The establishing of this data center in a remote and underpopulated region of Saudi Arabia indicates the country’s high aspirations.
When the Electric Futures team started to look at data centers just a year ago, the challenges of siting them in the US were only beginning to break into general consciousness. The creation of the electricity needed to power these supercomputers, their water consumption, and the noise they create have now become global news. Attracted to the anticipated markets for AI, the likes of Google, Meta , Open AI and Amazon are rushing to be the dominant supplier of computing capacity required for large language models.
This drive in not just in the US, but is felt globally as witnessed in the Gulf Countries where, as mentioned, Saudi Arabia, but also the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain are all building on renewable and fossil fuel energy sources and connectivity through subsea cables to use AI to solidify their places as major contributors to the 21st century global economy.
Chip and his wife Barbara in Saudi Arabia.
AI cannot function without hyperscale data centers. And these data centers are expected to grow US electricity consumption by 12% by 2030. That is simply an enormous amount of new electrical energy production requiring not only power generation stations (solar, wind, nuclear and gas) but also the grid to transmit and distribute that power to these AI factories.
These factories make nothing tangible. They create responses to queries or prompts. However, they do generate an enormous amount of heat. Cooling is a challenge and, in some localities, large demands are placed on the municipal water resources to deliver sufficient water to cool these behemoths.
When the Electric Futures team started to look at data centers, the push back against electricity price increases and water usage were only starting. A year later as we launch Season 3, data centers are part of the national debate about affordability.
We found ourselves on the ground floor on one such debate as two weeks after our November 2025 trip to the Imperial Valley, the public, including us, because aware of the proposal to build a 330MW, $10B data center on a piece of unincorporated land with residential communities in the cities of El Centro and Imperial on two sides.
With this announcement and the apparently accelerating pace of data center build out, communities in the Imperial Valley reacted the way we do in the US. First law suits were filed to pause the project and secondly community members activated to slow if not stop the building of the facility. Over the past 6 months, we have been on the ground floor of these developments with our production assistant Tajah Fortune living in the community and attending local meetings and our associate producer, Natalie Lopez having her family home adjacent to the proposed data center site. As Season 3 of Electric Futures goes live, the issues in the imperial Valley continue to evolve. Decision will need to be made. The community must decide if the growth in tax base is worthy of the downsides associated with having the data center in your back yard.
These discussions are different than those I held in Saudi Arabia where AI is seen as a path to an exciting future. The technology will leapfrog the Saudi economy into the modern world. The expectation is that their creativity and AI products will generate wealth on the order of that seen by Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Altman. The Saudis, too, seek to create trillionaires whose wealth is not based on oil. Yes, the Saudis recognize the potential downsides to the technology and are developing strong data AI frameworks that create the legal environment needed for advancing the technology. The opportunities of embracing AI are seen as outweighing the pitfalls.
And it is also true that in Saudi Arabia, governance is much more centralized. A systematic planning process can be undertaken and policies developed and debated that lead to desirable outcomes. Data centers are sited and decisions about to power and cool them are taken. Local communities do not hold zoning meetings. Rapid progress can be made.
In the US, our philosophy has been to not regulate this technology as regulation is seen as limiting innovation. The public finds this disconcerting. Too many examples of the down side of technology are visible and the lack of addressing these concerns has the public on edge. Local communities have started to say “no” to hosting data centers through local zoning boards or utility commissions. Much of the debate is on tangible issues like price of electricity, public health, and degradation of the aquifer. But the angst spills over into how AI is likely to alter society and these changes are being developed by a very limited number of very rich individuals. In the past 5 months, State and Federal level politicians have awoken to community concerns and elected bodies are voting on moratoriums or bans on data center growth. There is growing debate over the policy framework that will regulate applications of AI in surveilence or autonomous weapons.
The physical embodiment of AI lies in data centers. As a result, communities saying “no” to hosting them creates a drag on expansion of this technology. And this drag plays out at city council and town hall meetings. Not all communities are saying no. Advantages to some communities are disadvantages to others. It is through the back and forth at this local level that the decisions around siting of data centers will be made. The growing lack of support and the ability of these communities to slow penetration of AI into the economy has attracted the attention of both the developers of the technology and State and Federal elected officials. The debates are heated often between groups with different visions of the future of their community. Rarely are these fractures aligned with Republican and Democrat politics. The issues are around how people want to live; How they define quality of life and how the factories of AI fit into those visions. In the end votes are taken. And that is how we have decided decisions will be made. Entering into the investigation of challenges associated with siting of data centers, I was not anticipating being schooled on the workings of American Democracy.
C.F. Zukoski is the former USC provost and current Viterbi professor of engineering.
