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🦔The City of Tucson has revoked a temporary water meter Project Blue's contractor was using to truck Tucson drinking water out to a data center construction site that the City Council had explicitly rejected last August. Beale Infrastructure's contractor Ames Construction obtained the meter on April 24, then transported the water outside Tucson's service area to a project Pima County had separately approved over city objections. City Manager Tim Thomure asked Beale Infrastructure to make the city whole with two acre-feet of water credits. Project Blue says it is procuring construction water from an alternative source going forward. Arizona has been in drought conditions for over thirty years, and the project has faced sustained protests over environmental impact and transparency. My Take Building a hyperscale data center in the Sonoran Desert was already an aggressive choice given the water constraints, but trucking municipal drinking water out of a city that voted unanimously against the project is the kind of behavior that turns local opposition into national news. Beale's contractor obtained a permit through normal channels and used it in a way the city had specifically rejected, which technically followed procedure while completely violating the spirit of the council vote. The fact that a citizen tip triggered the investigation rather than any internal compliance check tells me the developer was banking on nobody noticing. I honestly keep coming back to how predictable this story is. Pima County approved the project over the city's objections, the developer told everyone Project Blue could not be built without Tucson water, and then the moment construction started they found a workaround that involved using Tucson water anyway. That sequence is a useful preview of how the AI infrastructure buildout is going to play out in every drought-stressed jurisdiction with weak coordination between county and municipal authorities. Hyperscale data centers consume water at a scale that does not fit the existing regulatory categories, and developers are exploiting the gaps faster than local governments can close them. Tucson got lucky that someone was paying attention, but most communities in Project Blue's situation will not. Hedgie🤗

This is the noise currently coming from the 30MW data center in Dowagiac, Michigan. Now imagine what it will sound like at 340MW. 😱 Research indicates that noise from a 340MW facility could be heard by residents within a 2.5-mile radius—and certain low-frequency sounds from data centers can travel up to five miles from the source.