Democratic state Sen. Steve Padilla is calling for public review of a massive data center designed to power generative artificial intelligence technology that has been proposed in the heart of the Imperial Valley.
The planned data center would be located on unincorporated land near the center of the city of Imperial. Many Imperial Valley residents learned that it was in the works just last week when officials in the city of Imperial released a notice online.
According to the notice, county officials decided in early November that the project would not have to undergo an environmental review.
In a letter to the Imperial County Board of Supervisors this week, Padilla, whose district includes Imperial County and South San Diego County, said the public deserved “a complete picture of the water usage and energy demands” of the nearly 1million square foot data center project before the county signed off on its construction.
“I can't fathom a situation where you have, again, just the intensity and scale and what is described in this particular case,” Padilla said in an interview Thursday morning. “And then claiming that there is some form of exemption to review.”
Data centers are large warehouses built to store and run massive amounts of computing hardware. They have long been part of the infrastructure of the internet but have faced growing scrutiny — especially over the vast amounts of power and water they can consume — as generative AI companies seek to vastly expand their footprint.
Padilla’s letter comes as Imperial Valley residents and advocates say they were blindsided by plans for the project.
There are still a number of unknowns about the project, including how far along it is in the county’s approval process. Imperial County spokesperson Eddie Lopez did not respond to interview requests Wednesday.
The developers behind the project, a Huntington Beach-based company called Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, pushed back against Padilla’s concerns.
In a detailed letter addressed to Padilla’s office and shared with KPBS Thursday morning, company leaders claimed the project was designed to meet high environmental standards.
“We share the community’s interest in protecting local resources and ensuring responsible growth in the Valley,” wrote Sebastian Rucci, a Huntington Beach-based attorney and managing member of the company. “We welcome continued public input and are committed to responding with facts, documentation, and operational commitments--not generalities.”
The proposed data center has a listed electric power rating of 330 megawatts, according to planning documents published by City of Imperial officials.
A megawatt is a measurement of how much energy the facility can receive at any given moment. Around 100 megawatts of electric power could support electricity for 80,000 households in the United States, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
Rucci said the data center would require 750,000 gallons of water per day for facility operations. That’s equivalent to the daily water use of about 9,000 U.S. households, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In a noon phone call Thursday, Padilla said his office had not yet had a chance to review Rucci’s response.
In his letter, Padilla referenced the toll of sweeping data center growth on energy and water availability in other parts of the country, like Northern Virginia and Newton County, Georgia.
Critics of the project celebrated Padilla’s request for more information as a step toward greater transparency.
Among them was Valle Imperial Resiste, a grassroots environmental justice advocacy group, which has been collecting signatures for a petition urging the Board of Supervisors to hold a public hearing on the project.
Gilberto Manzanarez, Resiste’s founder, said he found out about plans for the data center like everyone else — on Facebook.
“I have to say that I was not surprised,” Manzanarez said. “Imperial Valley has historically let companies and billionaires just come and extract whatever they want.”
Manzanarez compared the data center project to energy sectors like solar power, which many residents view as extracting resources without creating meaningful benefits for the region. Imperial County is one of the poorest counties in California and has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state.
“It kind of seems like maybe companies know this and they utilize this as a way to make their developments happen easier,” he said of the past promises of job growth. “But we've heard that a million times and the poverty rate is still high.”
Manzanarez said over 700 people have signed onto their petition asking the county to hold a public hearing.
Data centers can create large numbers of jobs during the construction phase, but most vanish after the facilities are up and running, according to a study by public policy researchers at the University of Michigan earlier this year.
The researchers found that the facilities, once built, require few employees to maintain and “do not contribute to sustained economic growth or long-term career opportunities for local residents.”
The concerns over the Imperial Valley data center come amid a growing fight over the growth of data centers and how lawmakers should regulate them — in California and elsewhere.
In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law authored by Padilla that charges California energy officials with analyzing whether data centers are driving up electricity costs for other customers.
But Newsom has also blocked other efforts to seek greater transparency around data centers. He vetoed a bill that would have required data centers to report their water usage, which is often not publicly available.
In a statement Wednesday, Padilla said he planned to introduce a new bill in January that would develop new energy and resource efficiency standards for data centers.
“We need to set guidelines for these companies or we will end up making the same mistakes made in other states,” he said. “Where data centers have raised costs on ordinary ratepayers, polluted their air, and degraded their water supply.”
