Maricopa County keeps selling growth as destiny. Data centers, subdivisions, warehouses and power demand keep coming. The desert, meanwhile, has begun sending invoices.

By Andrew Edling | The Maricopa Meridian

Out west of Phoenix, where the city finally loses its grip and the horizon becomes honest again, somebody wants to build a machine that may eventually demand 1.5 gigawatts of electricity.

That is not a typo.

Arizona Land Consulting bought the old Hassayampa Ranch property west of Phoenix with investors including venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. The company has discussed a potential $25 billion data-center development capable of reaching 1.5 gigawatts. Maricopa County records describe roughly 1,687 acres proposed for industrial uses including data centers and an energy campus.

The land had once been planned for as many as 5,707 homes.

That development never happened because the regional water and sewer infrastructure did not arrive.

Read that last sentence again.

The place could not support the infrastructure envisioned for thousands of houses, so the next act may be an industrial campus whose electrical appetite is measured in gigawatts.

This is Arizona development logic at its purest:

When reality closes one door, rezone the building.

And Hassayampa Ranch is hardly alone.

Maricopa County recently approved planning changes for another roughly 310 acres near 411th Avenue and Camelback Road outside Tonopah. The Camelback Creek property had been rural. Now it can accommodate industrial development, including potential data centers, with buildings reaching 85 feet.

There is no completed data center there.

There is not even a final user.

But there is zoning.

There is always zoning.

Then you step outside the hearing room and remember where you are.

This is the Sonoran Desert.

The temperature does not care about the economic-development presentation.

The Colorado River does not read chamber-of-commerce brochures.

Electrons cannot be rezoned into existence by unanimous vote.

And that is the problem with one of Arizona’s oldest civic religions:

Growth is treated not as a choice requiring arithmetic, but as a moral good requiring applause.

Maricopa County had an estimated 4.69 million residents in July 2025. In 2010, it had about 3.82 million.

That is nearly 870,000 additional people in 15 years.

Every one of them needs something.

Water.

Power.

A road.

A roof.

A school.

A sewer.

A hospital.

A transformer.

And, increasingly, a warehouse full of computers so somebody in Chicago can ask an artificial-intelligence model to make his golden retriever look like Napoleon.

We have reached the interesting part of the experiment.

Growth Pays for Growth. Supposedly.

The strongest argument from utilities and the data-center industry deserves to be stated clearly:

Arizona regulators say they are trying very hard not to stick residential customers with the cost of the industrial boom.

Arizona Corporation Commission Chairman Nick Myers has described the principle simply: large new electrical loads should pay for the infrastructure needed to serve them, backed by real financial guarantees rather than promises that could leave ordinary ratepayers holding stranded costs later.

APS has proposed similar protections, including substantially higher rates for extra-large users and long-term contracts requiring deposits, minimum payments and termination protections.

Good.

That is exactly what should happen.

But there is one irritating detail:

Some of these protections are still proposals.

The APS rate case went through weeks of hearings this summer. A final Arizona Corporation Commission decision is expected later, with new rates potentially beginning in 2027.

So when somebody assures you with the serene confidence of a man selling beachfront condominiums in Gila Bend that data-center growth cannot possibly affect your electric bill, remember:

Arizona is still writing parts of the rulebook while the bulldozers are warming up.

Camelback Creek provides a useful distinction.

County conditions require developers to pay for necessary site infrastructure, including road improvements and water and sewer service.

That is reassuring as far as it goes.

But paying for the pipe running to your building is not necessarily the same thing as paying for the consequences of requiring an entirely larger regional system.

Arizona’s utilities are staring at extraordinary demand.

At an Arizona Corporation Commission workshop, APS and SRP told regulators that requests from prospective large-load customers already exceed what they can currently serve. SRP said it serves 59 large-load customers totaling nearly 7,000 megawatts. APS projected about 13.1 gigawatts of peak demand from large customers.

Other forecasts suggest statewide electricity demand could roughly double within several years.

This is not a utility upgrade.

This is trying to build a second electrical civilization before the first one’s transformers wear out.

And Then There Is the Water

Attorney General Kris Mayes has called for a statewide pause on approvals and construction of new data centers, particularly hyperscale artificial-intelligence facilities, until Arizona develops a more comprehensive plan for their growth.

Her timing is not mysterious.

Arizona is simultaneously confronting tighter Colorado River supplies.

That does not mean Phoenix faucets run dry next Tuesday.

It does mean anyone proposing enormous new industrial demand in central Arizona should be required to show the water math without smoke machines.

Here, the data-center industry’s defense is stronger than some critics admit.

A modern facility does not necessarily consume some cartoonish Niagara Falls of cooling water.

Air-cooled and closed-loop systems can sharply reduce direct water consumption.

Different designs produce dramatically different results.

But physics has a sense of humor.

University of Arizona researchers examining Phoenix-area data centers found a tradeoff: water-cooled systems may consume significantly more water on-site, while air-cooled systems can require more electricity — which itself can carry indirect water demand depending on how that electricity is generated.

So the question:

“How much water does a data center use?”

is too primitive.

The useful questions are:

How much water does this design consume directly?

How much electricity does it require?

Where does that electricity come from?

What water is consumed producing it?

Show the numbers.

Not the slogan.

Now Show Us the Jobs

This is where the growth machine often gets slippery.

Supporters of Hassayampa Ranch have cited broad industry forecasts projecting enormous construction and permanent employment from statewide data-center expansion.

Those are industry-wide projections.

They are not promises of tens of thousands of jobs in Tonopah.

County records for Hassayampa Ranch identify no end user and no project-specific permanent-employment figure.

One zoning detail is revealing.

The county permitted warehouse and data-center parking at only one space per 2,500 square feet.

These buildings can be enormous without employing enormous numbers of people.

That does not make them worthless.

Construction jobs are real jobs.

Property investment is real money.

Electrical, mechanical and technical work can pay very well.

Digital infrastructure is not frivolous. Banking, medicine, communications, entertainment and modern computing all depend on it.

The mistake is pretending that every billion dollars of capital expenditure automatically produces a bustling factory town.

A billion-dollar server farm can look like economic Godzilla on a PowerPoint slide and like a very large, very quiet box after the ribbon-cutting crowd goes home.

Arizona has also spent years offering qualifying data centers substantial tax incentives.

Even that appetite has begun changing.

The state budget signed this summer imposed a three-year moratorium on new data-center tax-relief applications beginning July 1.

Apparently there is a level of growth at which even Arizona begins looking for the receipt.

And that is the deeper issue.

Maricopa County has spent generations operating a municipal parlay card.

More houses justify more roads.

More roads make distant land valuable.

Valuable land attracts warehouses and industry.

Industry demands more transmission and generation.

New infrastructure makes another patch of desert developable.

Then officials point to all that infrastructure as evidence that development should continue.

It is a beautiful system as long as the next bet always hits.

The strongest defense of that system is not stupid.

Growth has made metropolitan Phoenix larger, richer and more economically diverse.

A county that refused new residents, factories and technology would not necessarily have preserved some immaculate desert Eden.

It might simply have watched the investment move to Texas.

The question is whether Arizona can tell the difference between profitable growth and growth that is profitable because somebody else inherits the expensive part.

That somebody might be an electric customer 20 years from now.

It might be a Tonopah homeowner whose well needs to go deeper.

It might be a taxpayer widening another road.

It might be a future governor staring at a hotter, larger metropolis whose infrastructure commitments were made when the sales pitch was irresistible.

Or perhaps Arizona gets it right.

Perhaps giant industrial users really do finance the power plants, substations and transmission they require.

Perhaps better cooling systems keep water consumption under control.

Perhaps billions in investment build a tougher, wealthier Arizona without sending the bill to people who never entered the deal.

That possibility should not be mocked.

It should be audited.

Because the Valley is still moving tonight.

Head west on Interstate 10 and watch the subdivisions thin into desert.

Look back east and the rooftops keep marching toward every available mountain.

Transmission towers stride across the flats.

Trucks move through the heat.

Somewhere behind a wall is a warehouse that did not exist five years ago, cooling machines humming where creosote once stood.

Phoenix is not stopping.

Maybe it cannot stop.

That is the wager underneath all the other wagers.

Maricopa County has never had much trouble finding people willing to sell the future.

The hard part is figuring out who gets the invoice.