An hour’s drive north of the Imperial Valley, a new battleground is emerging in California’s debate over data centers and artificial intelligence.
The Coachella Valley, known for its famed music festival and date palm farms, is now the planned site for a massive 240-acre technology campus that includes a large data center project.
The campus would be built in the city of Coachella, a small, largely working-class city where 97% of residents identify as Latino. It would be a key part of the city’s ongoing efforts to create its own energy utility.
In a statement earlier this month, city officials said they haven’t approved the project yet and that it will need an environmental impact report.
Residents of Coachella and elsewhere in the valley are pushing back against the project, raising fears about energy and water needs, noise and air pollution.
At a City Council meeting last week, Coachella resident Stephanie Ambriz called on city officials to institute a moratorium on data center development.
“We have made it abundantly clear that we don’t want or need this project,” Ambriz said. “You can build a utility without data centers.”
Coachella’s community development director, Kendra Reif, did not respond to questions Monday morning. The project’s developer, Stronghold Power Systems, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The debate in the Coachella Valley comes after months of fiery opposition from residents against a massive data center project in the Imperial Valley, south of the Salton Sea.
The two developments fit into an emerging trend of data centers being proposed in rural communities.
Earlier this month, an analysis by the Pew Research Center found that the vast majority of existing data centers are in urban centers. But more than two thirds of planned data centers are coming to rural areas.
The Coachella and Imperial Valleys, Ambriz pointed out, are also linked in a more direct way.
The Imperial Valley’s public utility, the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), has supplied energy to the Coachella Valley since 1943. It’s currently coming up on the end of its 100 year-agreement to provide that power.
The debate in Coachella could place new pressure on the embattled utility, which has become a focal point of the data center debate in the Imperial Valley.
Ambriz noted reports that data centers are driving up energy costs for some communities, accusations which are under investigation by members of Congress.
“The data centers would also connect to IID, which means it would impact all existing customers across the Coachella Valley and in Imperial County,” Ambriz said.
IID spokesperson Robert Schettler declined to answer questions Monday.
At last week’s meeting, other residents urged the City Council to schedule public discussions about the data center project.
Tabitha Davies, a local farmer and nonprofit director from the tiny town of Sky Valley, said residents and farms already faced strict water conservation measures during drought cycles.
Davies questioned why the projects’ developers had decided to build the project in Coachella in particular.
“Someone made a choice to put this out there, not in a wealthier part of the valley,” Davis said. “That’s not an economic development, that’s an environmental injustice.”
Several Councilmembers said they would push to hold a public discussion about the project.
