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Beale Infrastructure is a data centre developer, owned by Blue Owl. One of the companies Beale develops for is Amazon Web Services.
One of Beale or Amazon thought it would be a good idea to build a water-sucking data centre in Tucson, Arizona — in a desert.
Beale and Amazon have pulled every trick they can to keep all details of this plan out of the public eye, and even out of the awareness of the local governments.
Project Blue has actually been in the works since 2022. That’s the year City of Tuscon staff signed non-disclosure agreements with Amazon such that the staff didn’t tell the elected city councillors anything about the plan until 2025: [Arizona Luminaria]
While city council members did not sign any non-disclosure agreements, Ward 4 council member Nikki Lee said an agreement was signed by Barbra Coffee, the director of Economic Initiatives for Tucson.
“I was told that one was signed on behalf of the City of Tucson and that it applied across the organization,” said Lee, whose ward would house the proposed data center.
The No Desert Data Center Coalition has a timeline of every quiet action by Beale and Amazon they could find over those initial years. It’s a useful checklist of the nonsense you can expect a data centre developer to pull. [timeline]
Pima County approved the plan to sell a block of land to Beale to build the first Project Blue data centre. Residents worried that Project Blue would suck up all the water and electricity, but Beale said it’d be fine, honest. [AZPM]
How much water would Project Blue use? The first version was set to use 2.9 million litres of water every day. [KGUN]
Beale said the data centre would use reclaimed water — but only after a few years of using fresh water. Beale also claimed they’d build a pile of water reclamation plants on site, but any of those existing would be a matter for the fabulous future. [Arizona Mirror]
There was quite a backlash over the abuse of non-disclosure agreements with local government. Amazon backpedaled:
We do not have any commitments or agreements in place to develop this project.
Later it came out that Amazon had got Pima County to sign a five-year non-disclosure agreement in 2023 to keep Amazon’s involvement out of public view. Surprising for a company with no “commitments or agreements”. Sounds not entirely true. [Arizona Luminaria]
In August, the City of Tucson Council voted unanimously to stop any data centre discussions with Beale and not grant them anything. Beale would get nothing from the City of Tuscon. This killed the first version of Project Blue. [Arizona Luminaria]
Beale proposed an air-cooled setup in September — that is, loud cooling fans screaming 24/7: [press release]
New air cooled design will utilize a closed-loop system and will not otherwise consume any water for industrial cooling.
Amazon pulled out of Project Blue entirely in December. Since then, Project Blue has not had a customer. [Arizona Daily Star]
Beale kept building the allegedly air-cooled version of Project Blue on the land in Pima County, even without any help from the city and without a customer.
A few weeks ago, it came out that Beale was using the city’s drinking water for dust control in the construction. The city had explicitly blocked Beale from using a drop of city water — but one of their contractors used their own rights to city water and drove that water to the Project Blue site by truck! Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure was not pleased: [Tucson Sentinel]
To our amazement, we were alerted to the fact that your contractor obtained a construction meter from Tucson Water from within the Tucson Water service area and transported that water out of our service area for use on Project Blue site. This was completely unacceptable and was terminated by Tucson Water immediately.
Thomure had previously been a huge booster for Project Blue. But even he was sick of their weaseling and dissembling. Thomure also demanded Beale pay for that water.
Without that water, the construction threw up masses of dust. So last Wednesday, Pima County issued Beale a notice of violation! [KGUN]
It also turns out the “air cooled” data centre will still need a huge amount of water. They can’t get it from the city of Tucson — so a Beale subsidiary has applied directly to the State of Arizona for permits to drill two wells so they can suck up 117 million litres of ground water each year. In the desert. [Tucson Sentinel]
You might think Beale wasn’t entirely telling the truth about not using any water for cooling the data centre.
With Amazon pulling out, Beale still doesn’t have a customer for this data centre. But that hasn’t stopped both Beale and Amazon pulling every scurvy trick and corporate shell game they can. When they’re not just straight-up lying. Because that’s what data centre developers do.
