An AI Data Center Promised No River Water. Now It's Suing for 260 Million Gallons.

An AI data center that spent months promising it would not touch the Colorado River is now suing for 260 million gallons of it a year. Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing filed suit against the Imperial Irrigation District after the district refused to sell it water, KPBS reported.

The Promise the Company Broke

The pitch was that the project would not strain the river. In a February blog post, the company said it “does not touch a single drop of the Colorado River” and would run on recycled wastewater from nearby cities.

Those recycled-water talks fell through. When the irrigation district rejected the company’s water application in May, it sued for river water instead.

What 260 Million Gallons Means in the Imperial Valley

The figure looks small next to the valley’s farms, but the place itself is the problem. The Imperial Valley is one of the most water-stressed regions in the country, and every drop of its fresh water comes from the overtaxed Colorado River.

260 million gallons a year, about what 7,300 local residents use, requested from the Colorado River by one data center that promised to use none of it.

The complex would need roughly 750,000 gallons a day to cool its servers, or about 880 acre-feet a year.

The Fallowing Workaround

The company’s legal argument is that it can offset the water by paying farmland to go dry. It leased 160 acres of active farmland and plans to leave it fallow, then claim the right to redirect the water that farm now receives to its servers.

Critics say that trades food production for server cooling, and that approving it would set a precedent the next developer will cite.

Local Officials Are Moving to Stop It

Imperial County is trying to slow the buildout. The Board of Supervisors is weighing an emergency moratorium on data center development, and the developer, Sebastian Rucci, has said he will sue for a restraining order to block it, arguing the county has not shown a real emergency.

The irrigation district’s chair, Karin Eugenio, has publicly opposed the project, and the board is weighing a new rate structure for data centers and other large energy users.

The Bigger Problem

AI data centers are marketed as digital, but they consume real water to cool their servers, often in the driest regions. Texas data centers are projected to use more water than 6 million households by 2030, and Corpus Christi is already rationing.

The Imperial Valley case is the same collision in a smaller frame: a data center buildout racing ahead of the water that exists to support it, with a company willing to break its own public promise once the cheaper option fell through.

What You Can Do Now

If you live in Imperial County, contact the Board of Supervisors before the next hearing and ask them to pass the emergency moratorium on new data centers until water and power impacts are studied.
Contact the Imperial Irrigation District board at (760) 339-9477 and back its decision to refuse the water application. Ask the board to finish the higher rate structure for data centers so existing ratepayers do not subsidize them.
Call your California state legislators at (916) 651-4000 (Senate) or (916) 319-2856 (Assembly) and ask them to require any large data center to prove a sustainable, non-potable water source before approval, not after.
Use the letter below to tell your representatives that scarce drinking and river water should not be diverted to cool server farms.

Update, July 15, 2026: The Nebraska Legislature passed a law requiring data centers to report their annual water use and power demand to state regulators. Jesse Bradley, director of the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, said the disclosure requirement is a “great start” and will support future resource planning. Before the law’s passage, Nebraska had no official count of how many data centers operate within the state.

Google’s Nebraska data centers consumed 732 million gallons of water in 2025, and the company expects that figure to grow, according to Grist. Meta’s Sarpy County data center withdrew between 26.7 million and 37.5 million gallons annually from 2020 to 2024, depending on the year. Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition, said data centers are expanding from urban centers into rural areas as fiber infrastructure improves.

John Winkler, general manager of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resource District, said placing data centers in water-insecure regions “doesn’t make sense” given existing agricultural demand on the state’s water supply. Eric Masanet, an engineering professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the industry should install technologies that reduce both energy and water consumption.