亚利桑那州的水源
工业耗尽了国家储水量数十年。 数据中心是断点。
由加比·德尔·瓦莱(Gaby Del Valle)撰写
照片来自Stephen Voss
从沙漠起伏的灰巨人我们的手机、电脑、电器、流线服务、搜索引擎、聊天机、 气相编码的应用软件和网站。 这个建筑群同时是巨大的和蹲地的，被环绕它的山脉所矮化，并且是无尽的。 我开车经过一栋大楼，然后另一栋大楼，然后地面打开建筑人员挖出地表，那儿有停车场，然后是另一个，然后是另一个。 这条街的另一边是一片空地，满是汽车，还有不定期的餐车来给成千上万的工人提供食物，他们忙着把这片广阔的沙漠变成工业园。 有尘埃，如此之多，窒息了空气。
我站在亚利桑那经济的救世主面前。 像所有伟大的神祇一样，它需要牺牲。 在沙漠中，没有什么比水更珍贵了，水是必须给予的了——每天从凤凰城的市政供应中取出近500万加仑。 献礼是值得的。
这些都是台湾半导体制造公司的成果，其亚利桑那州的运作是一场大规模前赌博的结果，菲尼克斯是为了重振其萧条的经济而制造的，而这种经济从未从大衰退中完全反弹。 TSMC的铸造业现在笼罩了城市的郊区。
TSMC是一个成功的故事，一些当地领导人可能希望用超大规模数据中心的发展来重复这个故事。 大峡谷州不仅拥有太平洋这一边最大的芯片厂，而且还拥有172个数据中心，但是，从凤凰城到图克森提出的更新的，更大的发展，对一切的要求都比亚利桑那人愿意给予的要多——更多的水，更多的电力，更多的土地。 亚利桑那州正面临大规模反弹，当地基层两党居民联盟联合起来反对数据中心。
亚利桑那州原住民克莉斯汀·麦凯告诉我 “芯片”。
在报道这个故事时，我与当地活动家和经济开发者，民选官员及其愤怒的选民进行了交谈。 我坐在市议会会议上人们排成一行与数据中心项目为敌，在舒适的郊区住宅中，紧凑的一群前陌生人向我讲述了将他们聚集在一起的斗争。 我浏览了亚利桑那干燥、破碎地貌的地图，这场辩论的两边的当地人声称想要同样的东西：一个更美好，更繁荣的亚利桑那。 然而，他们实现该目标的设想完全不相符。
在亚利桑那州和其他地方，数据中心开发商试图通过诱导他们带来的工作、税收和基础设施来战胜当地人。 他们要求的只是水，一些超规模数据中心，如Google在俄勒冈州Dalles的设施，每天使用约150万加仑，大约占TSMC亚利桑那州建筑群在同一时间段消耗量的三分之一。 这些保证不足以让亚利桑那人安心，亚利桑那人现在必须面对这个事实
TSMC的亚利桑那行动在没有任何强烈反对的情况下，亚利桑那人为何如此反对新的数据中心发展，水不够
亚利桑那州的生意围绕着“五C”：牛、铜、棉花、柑橘和气候
亚利桑那州原住民克莉斯汀·麦凯告诉我 “芯片”。
TSMC开发在某种意义上是麦凯在做。 作为凤凰城经济发展办公室主任，她率先将台湾巨头带到了索诺兰沙漠。 2020年，虽然全球经济完全关闭，但TSMC发布公告。 使世界陷入停顿的同一种力量对TSMC的产品产生了更大的需求，作为回应，TSMC将在凤凰城开设先进的半导体铸造厂——工业术语中的"法". 起初，TSMC预计到2029年，它将向亚利桑那州经济提供120亿美元。 从那时起，TSMC在该州的预计支出已经升至2,650亿美元，这家公司认为这是美国历史上最大的外国直接投资。
TSMC刚刚在凤凰城以北的一片荒凉地上铺平了第二层墙面三分之一正在建造中另有几处正在施工这种积蓄已经十多年了 TSMC于2016年开始四处购物以寻找一个美国地点。 当年，Mackay 称，公司通过代号发布招标书。 没有人赢了。
Mackay 称自豪地表示，她的办公室询问了TSMC高管们，他们认为亚利桑那州失踪了什么，然后花了接下来的三年时间来解决他们所关切的问题。 2019年，凤凰社派代表团去台湾分享科技园区的新发展计划，园区的核心将是工厂，理想的是TSMC的花样之一。 Mackay告诉我：“他们同意他们需要回来再看看凤凰城，她的团队向她们展示了两个地点：亚利桑那州拉文(Laveen)，位于凤凰城西南的郊区；就在城市以北，一个未开发的地区大致相当于曼哈顿的大小，叫做"比斯凯特平地"(Biscuit Flats)，所以Mackay告诉我，因为"它像饼干一样圆而平地".
她回顾，“就在那一天，他们称，`这可以奏效。 ` ` '
接下来是一团糟的发展不像国家所见过的 TSMC为全州带来超过3500个工作，TSMC在台湾占台湾国内生产总值的近十分之一，该公司控制全球芯片市场的70%，仅与Apple和Nvidia的合同就占其年收入的三分之一以上。 (Apple和Nvidia设计自己的芯片，但并不生产。 复杂的制造工艺则主要外包给TSMC. )
TSMC改变了凤凰城的地貌和产业，带来了就业和繁荣。 当地人担心新的超规模数据中心的开发将有利于前者，而不利于后者，消耗资源却对社区贡献不大。 Mackay在过去帮助法庭数据中心发展时，“前10个数据中心我确实看起来像一个很小的办公楼
所提出的新发展既不漂亮也不小。 在早期数据中心不引人注目的地方，超规模设施开发商希望在亚利桑那州建造——往往在农村农场或沙漠地上建造——既庞大又不协调。 尽管该州最近以收购为扩张出名，但仍有很多地方，在宁静的沙漠中，有时可以在半夜听到一包野狼叫声。 有黑暗天空走廊和野生动物，鬼城和沙瓜罗森林。 一些当地人说，所有这一切都可以为了一个对人类也构成生存威胁的产业而牺牲。 有道德问题和环境问题，关于分区和税收的辩论，最重要的是关于水的辩论。 城市和外围郊区在不断增长，而工业，不知何故，不断到达，口渴比以往任何时候。
亚利桑那人全年但特别在夏天都会根据元素调整他们的日常活动司机要注意不要被尘暴或季风所困。 慢跑者避免在晚间和早午出外出出出行，此时热量最强。 而在8月1日，在季风季节的高峰期，无沙漠数据中心联盟的抗议活动从早晚开始，太阳的惩罚性射线开始让位于一片虚弱的沙漠日落。
约有一打人出现在图克森市郊的集会上，在比厄基础设施正在建设600兆瓦数据中心的290英亩场地前。 每几分钟，组织者之一Vivek Bharathan就提醒抗议者保持水分状态。 孩子们用水枪互相喷洒，并忠实地接受父母的饮料。 参与者之一的Mayra Duron带了一台Gagua de jamaicato的凉快机与团体分享。 紫红色的饮料，她称，充满了电解质。 水——缺乏水分，需要水分，在沙漠中部建立大规模数据中心所需的数量——是头等大事。 BEALE的DATA CENTER Will SKK US DRY。
Bharathan告诉小群众，若他们能在这里成功建立数据中心，我们知道这些现象会形成热岛，对周边地区的影响会超过10华氏度。” 称担心气温升高会如何影响当地瓜瓜罗斯。 “在凤凰城，它已经超工业化了。 ”她称说，“而且他们已经看到沙瓜罗斯左右死亡。 ”
汽车按喇叭支持。 一些司机在行走时抽出拳头出windows. 亚利桑那人并没有在2019年激怒AI，当时TSMC项目是宣布，事情变了 Tucson，它看起来是联合起来反对数据中心被誉为"蓝色工程"的复合体。 但建筑物还是要上楼了
“我们认为这是正常的，但这并不正常。 这是一场灾难。
关于"蓝色项目"的信息在2025年春季开始缓慢地流出。 先是这个名字，还有一些线索：开发无论什么，都会在一地为县所有的地块上；在路下创造出3000个临时建筑工和200个高薪职位；在后十年内将产生1.52亿的税收；会大而口渴，会建造出新的水线来保持它的饱和。 所有知情的人都会这么说因为拥有土地的县政府与未来的开发商签署了一份不披露协议
消息以繁琐的官僚主义方式传出，如关于中等城市未来地产销售的信息经常如此。 2025年6月，皮马县行政长官扬·莱舍向监事会提交了一份44页的备忘录。 线
本文由 AI宝库自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
AI has come for Arizona’s water
Industry has drained the state’s water reserves for decades. Data centers are the breaking point.
by Gaby Del Valle
Photos by Stephen Voss
A hulking gray giant rises from the desert. Inside, engineers create the force behind our phones and computers and appliances, our streaming services and search engines and chatbots and vibe-coded apps and websites. The complex is simultaneously massive and squat, dwarfed by the mountains that surround it, and it is endless. I drive past one building, and then another, and then the ground opens up where construction crews have dug up the earth so a third building can rise. There is a parking lot, and then another, and then another. There is an empty lot on the other side of the street, full of cars and the occasional food truck to feed the thousands of laborers who are busy transforming this expanse of desert into an industrial park. There is dust, so much of it, choking the air.
I stand before the savior of Arizona’s economy. Like all great deities, it demands sacrifice. In the desert, nothing is more precious than water, and water is what must be given — nearly 5 million gallons a day, every day, sourced from Phoenix’s municipal supply. The offering has been well worth it.
All of this is the fruit of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s leading producer of microchips. Its Arizona operation is the result of a pre-pandemic gamble Phoenix made to revive its sluggish economy, which never quite rebounded from the Great Recession. Now TSMC’s foundry looms over the city’s outskirts.
TSMC is a success story, one that some local leaders may have hoped to repeat with hyperscale data center developments. The progression may have seemed natural: The Grand Canyon State is not only home to the largest chip factory this side of the Pacific but also 172 data centers, neither of which faced much pushback. But the newer, larger developments being proposed from Phoenix to Tucson demand more of everything — more water, more power, more land — than Arizonans are willing to give. Where TSMC was welcomed with open arms and the first wave of data centers was largely ignored, new developments are facing mass backlash in Arizona, where a grassroots, surprisingly bipartisan coalition of residents has united against data centers.
Now the state has a sixth C, Arizona native Christine Mackay tells me. “Chips.”
In reporting this story, I spoke to local activists and economic developers, elected officials and their angry constituents. I sat in on city council meetings where people lined up by the dozens to speak up against data center projects, and in cozy suburban homes where tight-knit groups of former strangers told me about the struggle that brought them together. I pored over maps of Arizona’s dry, cracked landscape with laypeople who, over the past two years, have made themselves experts on zoning and land use and water consumption so they can understand the beast they’re trying to fight. The locals on both sides of this debate claim to want the same thing: a better, more prosperous Arizona. Their visions for achieving it, however, are completely at odds.
In Arizona and elsewhere, data center developers have tried to win over locals by making enticing promises about the jobs, tax revenue, and infrastructure they’ll bring with them. All they ask for in exchange is water — and, they swear, not nearly as much of it as you’d expect. Some hyperscale data centers, like Google’s facility in The Dalles, Oregon, use about 1.5 million gallons a day, about one-third of what TSMC’s Arizona complex consumes in the same timeframe. Those reassurances, however, aren’t enough to assuage Arizonans, who now have to contend with the fact that the state will soon lose access to nearly 30 percent of the water it receives from the Colorado River.
Even now, as people across the country sour on AI and fight against data centers in their communities, TSMC’s Arizona operation hums along without significant opposition. And yet it’s impossible to make sense of why Arizonans are so opposed to new data center development without first understanding why they eagerly welcomed TSMC, even though both industries must contend with the issue that has plagued Arizona since its founding: There isn’t enough water.
For as long as anyone could remember, business in Arizona revolved around the storied “five C’s”: cattle, copper, cotton, citrus, and climate, a catchall for the region’s mild, salubrious winters, which locals say often more than make up for the sweltering summers.
Now the state has a sixth C, Arizona native Christine Mackay tells me. “Chips.”
The TSMC development is, in a sense, Mackay’s doing. As the head of Phoenix’s economic development office, she spearheaded the effort that brought the Taiwanese giant to the Sonoran Desert. In 2020, while the global economy was all but shut down, TSMC made an announcement. The same forces that brought the world to a standstill had created even more demand for TSMC’s products, and in response, TSMC would be opening an advanced semiconductor foundry — a “fab,” in industry jargon — in Phoenix. Initially, TSMC predicted that it would pour $12 billion into Arizona’s economy by 2029. Since then, TSMC’s projected expenditure in the state has ballooned to $265 billion, what the company touts as the largest foreign direct investment in US history.
TSMC just put the finishing touches on its second fab in a formerly desolate swath of north Phoenix, with a third under construction and plans for several more underway. This buildout has been more than a decade in the making. TSMC started shopping around for a US location in 2016. That year, Mackay said, the company put out a request for proposals through a codename. No one won.
“We aren’t a group that takes no for an answer,” Mackay said proudly. Her office asked TSMC executives what they thought Arizona was missing, and then spent the next three years addressing their concerns. In 2019, Phoenix sent a delegation to Taiwan to share a new development plan for a science and technology park, the nucleus of which would be a factory, ideally one of TSMC’s fabs. “They agreed they needed to come back and take another look at Phoenix,” Mackay told me. Her team showed them two locations: Laveen, Arizona, a suburb southwest of Phoenix, and, just north of the city, an undeveloped area roughly the size of Manhattan called Biscuit Flats, so named, Mackay told me, because “it’s as round and flat as a biscuit.”
“That very day,” she recalled, “they said, ‘This could work.’”
What followed was a flurry of development unlike anything the state has ever seen. TSMC has brought more than 3,500 jobs to the state, and an entire economy has sprung up to support the company’s Arizona operation. Much like in Taiwan — where the company accounts for nearly one-tenth of Taiwan’s gross domestic product — TSMC has become, if not the center of the universe, then at least a galaxy unto itself. The company controls an estimated 70 percent of the global chip market, and its contracts with Apple and Nvidia alone make up more than one-third of its annual revenue. (Apple and Nvidia design their own chips, but they don’t produce them. The complex manufacturing process is instead largely outsourced to TSMC.)
TSMC has changed swaths of Phoenix — its landscape, its industries — and it has brought with it jobs and prosperity. Locals fear that the new hyperscale data center developments will do the former but not the latter, consuming resources while contributing little to the community. Mackay, who has worked as an economic developer for over 30 years, didn’t experience significant pushback when she helped court data center developments in the past. “The first 10 data centers I did look like pretty little office buildings,” she said.
The new developments being proposed are neither pretty nor little. Where earlier data centers were inconspicuous, the hyperscale facilities developers want to build in Arizona — often on rural farm or desert land — are both massive and incongruous. Despite the state’s recently acquired reputation for sprawl, there are still plenty of places where, in the quiet desert stillness, you can sometimes hear a pack of coyotes howl in the middle of the night. There are dark-sky corridors and wild animals, ghost towns and saguaro forests. All of this, some locals say, could be sacrificed for the benefit of an industry that also poses an existential threat to humanity. There are ethical questions and environmental ones, debates over zoning and taxes and, most of all, over water. Yet the cities and the outlying suburbs keep growing, spreading in all directions until they’re constrained by geography or bureaucracy or Indigenous sovereignty. And industry, somehow, keeps arriving, thirstier than ever.
Year-round but especially in the summers, Arizonans tailor their routines to the elements. Drivers are careful not to get stuck in dust storms or monsoons. Joggers avoid going out in late mornings and early afternoons, when the heat is at its most intense. And on August 1st, at the peak of monsoon season, the No Desert Data Center Coalition’s protest began in the early evening, when the sun’s punishing rays were starting to give way to a muted desert sunset.
About a dozen people showed up to the rally on the outskirts of Tucson, in front of the 290-acre site where Beale Infrastructure is building a 600-megawatt data center. Every few minutes, Vivek Bharathan, one of the organizers, reminded the protesters to stay hydrated. Children sprayed each other with water guns and dutifully accepted drinks from their parents. Mayra Duron, one of the attendees, brought a cooler of agua de jamaicato share with the group. The magenta beverage, she said, was full of electrolytes. Water — the lack of it, the need for it, the amount required to build a massive data center in the middle of the desert — was top of mind. A hand-painted banner expressed the overarching sentiment: BEALE’S DATA CENTER WILL SUCK US DRY.
“If you feel the heat, please head home,” Bharathan told the small crowd. “It is a hot day, and if they succeed in building a data center here, it’ll be even hotter. We know these things create heat islands that can affect the surrounding area by over 10 degrees Fahrenheit.” Duron, a local macrame artist who incorporates cactus spines into her weaving, said she worried about how rising temperatures would affect the region’s saguaros. “In Phoenix, it’s hyper-industrialized,” she said, “and they’ve seen saguaros die left and right.”
Cars honked in support. Some drivers pumped their fists out their windows as they sped by. Arizonans weren’t riled up about AI in 2019, when the TSMC project was announced, nor did they notice or care much about the previous data centers that were quietly built throughout the state. Things have changed. Tucson, it appears, is united in its opposition to the data center complex dubbed Project Blue. But the buildings are going up anyway.
“We take it as normal because it’s been that way for so long. But it isn’t normal. It’s a catastrophe.”
Information about Project Blue began slowly trickling out in the spring of 2025. First came the name, and some clues: The development, whatever it was, would be on a county-owned plot of land; it would create 3,000 temporary construction jobs and 200 well-paying positions down the road; it would generate $152 million in tax revenue over the next decade; it would be big, and it would be thirsty, and new water lines would be built to keep it satiated. That was all anyone in the know would say, because the county government, which owned the land, signed a nondisclosure agreement with the would-be developer.
The news came out in a mundane, bureaucratic way, as information about prospective land sales in midsize cities often does. In June 2025, Jan Lesher, the Pima County administrator, submitted a 44-page memo to the Board of Supervisors. Th
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Gem Box. All rights belong to the original author.