Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Pinal County holds work session on data centers; ASU, utilities and state agency outline water, power and community trade-offs
Summary
Arizona State University, utilities APS and SRP, and the Arizona Commerce Authority briefed Pinal County supervisors on data-center growth, noting site-specific water impacts, utility queue pressures (gigawatts of requests), and tools — permits, load agreements and ordinances — counties can use to manage impacts.
Kelly Barr of Arizona State University introduced a Pinal County work session on data centers, saying rapid growth driven by cloud services and AI has put Arizona "in the purple area" for industry expansion and prompted the county to seek more information on water, power and community effects.
The presentations that followed laid out a sequence of site-specific risks and regulatory tools. "By the 2026, global data center usage will top 1,050 terawatt hours," Kelly Barr said, underscoring the industry’s scale and energy appetite. He described three facility types — small server rooms, colocation facilities and hyperscale campuses that can require hundreds of megawatts — and said location choices are driven by tax, utility and network incentives.
Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU’s Morrison Institute, told supervisors that current data show data centers are not, on the whole, creating a statewide water crisis in Arizona’s Active Management Areas (AMAs). "Right now, data center use is not a water problem," she said, but she…
Already have an account? Log in
Subscribe to keep reading
Unlock the rest of this article — and every article on Citizen Portal.
- Unlimited articles
- AI-powered breakdowns of topics, speakers, decisions, and budgets
- Instant alerts when your location has a new meeting
- Follow topics and more locations
- 1,000 AI Insights / month, plus AI Chat
