A data centre promised no river water, then sued for some

Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing spent much of last year telling residents of California’s Imperial County that its planned data centre campus would leave the Colorado River alone entirely. The pledge appeared in a February blog post on the website of Sebastian Rucci, the Huntington Beach lawyer and developer behind the project, which said the facility would rely solely on recycled municipal wastewater and “does not touch a single drop of the Colorado River.” That pledge has now collapsed into a lawsuit.

After months of negotiations with the nearby cities of Imperial and El Centro over recycled-water supply broke down, and the Imperial Irrigation District rejected the company’s water application in early May, IVCM filed suit in Imperial County Superior Court on 5 June seeking roughly 260 million gallons of river water annually — enough, on the company’s own figures, to cover a few thousand county residents’ yearly use. Rather than simply asking for a fresh allocation, the suit pursues the water through a farmland-fallowing arrangement, paying growers to fallow acreage and transferring their rights to the project, a mechanism water-rights lawyers are watching as a possible template elsewhere. The facility would be California’s largest data centre, a 950,000 square-foot, 330-megawatt campus with its own battery storage, in a region already governed by some of the most contested water rights in the American West.

What makes the episode instructive is not the volume at stake, small against the valley’s vast agricultural allocation, but the sequencing, and what has followed. The commitment not to draw on the river predated the recycled-water deals it depended on; IVCM’s own suit calls the switch to the irrigation district a “last resort” after those deals collapsed. Days after a board candidate IVCM had backed lost the June primary for a seat on the district’s board, the company sued that same board, and county supervisors who fast-tracked the project in April have since reversed course, imposing a moratorium while a 19-member committee rewrites the rules by 2027.

The facility purchases municipal wastewater that would otherwise be discarded. It does not touch a single drop of the Colorado River.

That line, from the February blog post, now reads as a contingent promise rather than a design constraint. Whether the fallowing mechanism satisfies the valley’s water-rights holders, or hands the next developer a route to the same river, is what the 2027 rules will have to decide.