Inside the long, bitter fight over one man’s quest to build the biggest AI datacenter in California

A modern-day prospector promised rural Imperial thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue – but his plan has set off a firestorm of resistance

Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he’d been searching for – the perfect place to realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California .

The dusty expanse wasn’t an obvious location. It was in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border, where temperatures regularly rose past 100F (37.8C). Water was scarce in the once-booming agricultural area, which gets its supply from the beleaguered Colorado River. And then, there was the city of Imperial – population 22,000 – to win over. As controversial datacenter projects have sprung up across the US, residents were naturally skeptical of a new, energy-guzzling neighbor.

But for Rucci, a 66-year-old lawyer with a complicated past, none of these obstacles seemed insurmountable.

Rucci is among the new class of middlemen who inhabit the burgeoning world of datacenter development. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence – galvanized by Silicon Valley companies worth trillions of dollars – has fueled one of the biggest industrial construction booms in history. The technology requires far more computing power than traditional internet services, and that means building enormous new structures to house millions of servers.

This proliferation of datacenters is now attracting modern-day prospectors seeking land in hopes of cashing in on one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative industries on Earth. Set in their sights are areas like Imperial county : rural, underdeveloped and desperate for an economic boost.

“I didn’t know much about datacenters,” Rucci said, recalling a couple of years back. “I made calls to people I knew in Silicon Valley. And within a short period, I realized: holy shit, this stuff is huge.”

Rucci, a self-described expert at doing the tedious legwork of packaging permits and plans, proved adept at selling a bright future of economic development to county lawmakers. He said his sales skills also nabbed him a direct line to Google, which floated interest in being the tenant of the datacenter, according to emails between Rucci and county agencies.

With the promise of these potential partnerships and support from construction unions , Rucci moved into high gear last year and began plotting his nearly 1m-square-foot datacenter – a facility the size of 16 football fields combined. He said he had invested about $5m already, and, if it gets approved and passed off to a builder, he expects “big multipliers of that” in return.

What Rucci didn’t expect, however, was the firestorm of resistance his project set off in the community .

Over the past year, more than half a dozen lawsuits have been filed, along with recall efforts for local officials who supported the project. Even a temporary 45-day datacenter moratorium was approved.