“We really thought we had won,” says Lee Ziesche, a cochair of the Tucson Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Arizona, ruefully recalling August 2025. Along with other groups and thousands of community members, DSA had been battling the developer Beale Infrastructure over a massive artificial intelligence data center called Project Blue.

In this desert city, water is precious and also a public utility. (Excessive water usage is a much-criticized aspect of the data center boom.) The developers had said they would not build Project Blue unless the City of Tucson annexed the land; that way, the data center would be served by Tucson water. “There was massive opposition to [the data center] for a lot of reasons,” Ziesche explains, “but the number-one thing is, conserving water is just part of the culture here. Everyone learns about it in school.” Moreover, Ziesche says, “It reached 100 degrees here last March, so we are obviously very aware of the climate crisis.”

“I’ve seen a lot of opposition to major infrastructure projects,” says Ziesche, who also fought pipelines in New York City, “and I have never seen anything like the resistance [to Project Blue] in Tucson. It’s pretty dead here in the summer; the snowbirds leave, and it’s really hot.” But that summer, a thousand people showed up to a public meeting. The city council decided unanimously not to annex the land for the data center, which meant the city wouldn’t be providing the water. A win!