Big tech sets its sights on rural Arizona

The blog’s most recent post, by Professor Lisa Pruitt, discussed the Rural Health Transformation Program. Passed as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” this “rural slush fund” was added as a last-minute sweetener to secure the support of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

One of the $50 billion fund’s stated goals is “tech innovation.” States utilizing the funds must spend them on three or more approved uses, including:

Providing training and technical assistance for the development and adoption of technology-enabled solutions that improve care delivery in rural hospitals, including remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies.

This sounds promising. Rural hospitals face unique challenges, and technology that improves care and increases capacity could be transformative. An earlier post on this blog by Morgen Hopson discussed how RFK Jr. has promoted AI nurses as a potential solution to the rural health care crisis. However, the current reality of artificial intelligence in rural communities is not one of investment but of extraction.

In December 2025, Sharon Goldman reported for Fortune on a massive AI data center project planned for rural Arizona. The development would be built on a 2,000-acre property called Hassayampa Ranch, located about 50 miles west of Phoenix near the unincorporated community of Tonopah in western Maricopa County. The area is home to a few hundred residents, drawn there for its tranquility and clear skies for stargazing.

Photo caption: Buckeye Ranch, Tonopah. © Nextdoor

This quiet corner of the desert has become the center of intense activity after developer Anita Verma-Lallian purchased the land for $51 million, backed by billionaire venture capitalist and Trump mega-donor Chamath Palihapitiya. The plan is to spend as much as $25 billion to build a data center that would produce 1.5 gigawatts of compute and consume as much electricity as a million homes.

Photo caption: Visualization of the land parcel. © Jason Ma, 2025

Investment in rural communities sounds exciting, but who benefits? So far, AI is largely being developed for and used by urban populations. Rural people struggle with poor network coverage and slow internet speeds. So while it remains unclear whether Tonopah will reap any benefits from hosting AI infrastructure, residents are already bearing the costs.

This pattern echoes concerns raised in prior posts on this blog. In May 2024, Professor Pruitt wrote about how rural folks in Montana are resisting efforts to make their land a “carbon sponge” for urban America. As one county commissioner put it:

The question I keep hearing is, ‘Why are they making us the dumping ground for the rest of the country?’

A similar dynamic is at play here, with rural Arizona poised to bear the environmental burden of infrastructure that primarily serves urban tech consumers.

In her Fortune article, Goldman explains that Tonopah residents are already worried about incoming noise and light pollution, traffic and infrastructure strain, and negative impacts on property values. Concerned community members have organized and signed petitions against the development. But with such a small population, their political power is limited against billionaire-backed interests. As Kathy Fletcher, a 76-year-old resident who lives on a one-acre plot next to the Hassayampa Ranch site, said:

All we can do is plead with the people here... We’re kind of treated like the redheaded stepchild, and they just think they can throw anything they want out here... We’re having a difficult time fighting the battle to tell people, ‘You can make a difference.’

Another major concern is water. AI data centers generate vast amounts of heat and require millions of gallons of water per day for cooling. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a medium-sized data center can consume up to 110 million gallons of water per year—equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger data centers can use up to 5 million gallons per day. For the people of Tonopah, who rely almost exclusively on wells for their water needs, the prospect of a massive development tapping into their water supply is daunting.

As Dillon Beckett wrote on this blog, utility-scale projects are “overwhelmingly sited in rural areas” and tend to “benefit a sliver of the community’s social strata (wealthy, often absentee landowners, with extensive real estate holdings) while spreading the cost across the entire community." The Hassayampa Ranch data center fits this pattern: Silicon Valley investors stand to profit, while local residents face rising utility costs, depleted aquifers, and a transformed landscape.

Tonya Pearsall, a Tonopah resident who has lived in the area since 1999, feels a profound sense of loss as this project rapidly changes the character of her once-calm community:

We used to be able to see the Milky Way—that’s why we moved out here... It’s painful... I could break down and cry.

Photo caption: The night sky over Maricopa County. © David Iversen, 2025.

There is some movement in Congress to address these concerns. Representative Jim Costa (D-CA) has introduced the Unleashing Low-Cost Rural AI Act, which would require the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and Energy to study the impact of AI data center expansion on rural areas, including effects on energy supply, consumer costs, and infrastructure needs. Whether such a study will lead to meaningful protections for communities like Tonopah remains to be seen.

The Hassayampa Ranch project is not unique. Similar fights are playing out in Louisiana, Wisconsin, and Georgia, where rural residents are pushing back against data center proposals that promise economic development but threaten local resources and quality of life.

As AI continues its rapid expansion, rural communities across the country will increasingly find themselves on the front lines of a familiar struggle: who decides what happens to rural land, and who bears the cost of progress?