The blog’s most recent post 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 discussed how RFK Jr. has promoted AI nurses as a potential solution to the rural health care crisis. That optimistic vision contrasts sharply with how artificial intelligence is currently arriving in many rural areas.
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 since 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? As Andrew Aitken noted in The Builder Bureau, AI is largely being developed for and used by urban populations, while rural people continue to 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 entries on this blog. A May 2024 post discussed 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 in Tonopah, 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 ground 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?
3 comments:
Using rural land as the "dumping ground" for data-center development suggests it is the "solution" for urban demand. However, rural residents often lack leverage to influence the terms of such projects. If "tech innovation" is the goal for rural America, host communities shouldn't have to fight an uphill battle for basic protections. Instead, those protections should be the starting point. If policymakers cannot first guarantee local benefits proportional to the burdens caused by data-center development, tech innovation in rural America will always be an extraction tool.
As we learned, one potential solution to the lack of rural power on the planning of urban developments is the creation of entities like CoreHub drafting or requiring community benefits agreements when there is a project that can be potentially exploitative. However, given the lack of strong legislative and administrative mechanisms protecting rural populations and giving equivalent negotiation power it would be almost impossible for rural populations to fight back on projects of this scale without additional leverage.
I know that many native tribes in Nevada are facing a similar issue to this data-center development. The U.S. government has permitted lithium mining in Nevada that tribes are concerned will endanger their health and rights to a healthy environment. Also, much of this land, while may seem like open desert, is historical cultural tribal land, now being exploited to mine lithium for batteries for electric cars that many people in the area will not benefit from.
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