water security and food production

In Arizona, we are starting to see many proposals for data centers, Chip, etc. and similar manufacturers. It is interesting as there is a lot of obvious large building going on in Arizona. I would not think there is a lot of natural resource available to sustain the type of industry coming to Arizona. It is sort of rent taking now and deal with the greater issues later. Probably this will occur after the water resource becomes more limited.

An analysis of the Colorado River Basin published in 2014, at the University of California, Irvine. “If left unmanaged for another decade, groundwater levels will continue to drop, putting Arizona’s water security and food production at far greater risk than is being acknowledged,” taken from: “Arizona’s Declining Groundwater,” NASA Science.

Yet, the state and city legislatures appear to be going along with the builds without a lot of concern.

The Urgent Case Against Data Centers,

Economic Argument: Food and Water Watch

“Empty revenue and job promises,” (page 9)

State and local officials may court Big Tech’s data centers for their promised tax revenue. However, the
race to offer data centers the most generous and inventive subsidies cuts into this. A proposed 500 MW data center in Genesee County, New York plans to build on land that the state paid millions of dollars in public money to prepare, and the company will likely receive property tax exemptions also.

In Wisconsin, data centers can create tax increment districts that shift the cost of building roads, water pipes, and other infrastructure to localities while denying them local property tax revenue.

“Rural Wisconsin has become a hotspot for data centers. State’s unique tax instrument explains why,” Wisconsin Examiner. In Wisconsin, a TID lets developers pay their property taxes into a separate box from the rest of the community as a way to capture property value growth associated with new projects. During construction, a developer, like Vantage, contributes taxes to this special box to cover infrastructure costs associated with their project, like new roads and power lines. Depending on the terms of the TID. That tax money is then kept in the box until all infrastructure costs have been paid, often a period of 15-20 years.

Typically, this kind of tax policy helps small- or medium-scale developers, like new packing plants or housing developments, pay for their associated infrastructure costs over time. With hyperscale data centers, rural residents worry the high costs of the developments’ power and water infrastructure will rack up for the community to pay while the developers’ taxes sit in a special box. 

“If the village decides to raise the tax levy, it comes off the backs of the current residents only, and that is completely and utterly invisible right now to most people,” said Balch, who worked to reject Microsoft’s proposed data center campus in Caledonia last fall.

In November of 2025, the city of Port Washington approved a TID that enables Vantage to pay upfront for the estimated $175 million in infrastructure costs, plus $91 million for an electrical substation and $187 million in interest, associated with their data center campus, including upgraded water and sewer mains and new power infrastructure. Port Washington will then be responsible for paying Vantage back for those infrastructure costs over time.

The TID is set up as a pool of money to remain open for up to 20 years for the city to draw from to reimburse Vantage. Some residents, including Beaster, have expressed concerns the financing model could end up raising taxes for locals. On January 2, 2026, a Port Washington-based group of activists filed a lawsuit against the city to challenge the TID.

“People don’t want to see their communities handed over to large corporations,” Beaster said.

Most states with data centers offer these facilities exemptions on sales and use tax. In fiscal year 2025, Virginia lost $1.6 billion in tax revenue from data centers under this exemption, and in 2024, Georgia lost $450 million. The sales and use tax exemption alone could amount to billions in lost revenue nationally each year.

Data centers secure these tax incentives on the promise of economic growth and job creation. But long-term employment growth at the centers is minimal, creating relatively few permanent positions once construction is complete. In 2021, a Microsoft data center in Illinois received more than $38 million in state sales tax exemptions but created only 20 permanent jobs, according to a CNBC report.

A Business Insider analysis found that even the largest data centers typically employ fewer than 150 permanent workers, with some employing as few as 25. In total, as few as 23,000 people nationally worked in data centers as of 2024 (0.01 percent of all jobs), according to a recent Food & Water Watch (FWW) analysis. Moreover, these jobs do not come cheaply. FWW found that from 2020 to 2025, Virginia’s data centers created just one permanent job per every $54 million invested — 168 times more than what it costs to create one permanent non-data center job ($322,000) (see Fig. 1).

E-waste

Today’s data center investments will inevitably become tomorrow’s obsolete assets which will exacerbate the e-waste problem.

Servers last approximately five years, while microchips last just one to three years. Yet and since 2010, e-waste generation worldwide grew five times faster than recycling efforts. High-income countries often ship their e-waste to developing countries. Less than 25 percent gets recycled globally. The rest lands in toxic dumps or is funneled into illegal trading routes. Workers handling e-waste are routinely exposed to heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium, which are linked to a host of health harms from neuro-developmental impairments to cancer.

RPT2_2602_DataCenterMoratorium.pdf “The Urgent Case Against Data Centers”

Also, Common Dreams has a piece up: “With First-of-Its-Kind Bill, Sanders and AOC Propose Moratorium on New AI Data Centers”