The Guardian published an essay June 14 by Mark Arax that chronicles California’s history of extraction and argues the pattern is repeating in two contemporary crises: groundwater depletion in the San Joaquin Valley and the unchecked expansion of AI data centers in Silicon Valley.
In Pleasant Valley, a 14,000-acre farming district in Fresno County, the essay describes a power struggle over a shrinking aquifer. Brad Gleason, the district’s board president before a recent takeover, had developed a sustainability plan to meet the state’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires a two-thirds reduction in pumping by 2042. “That’s what sustainability is going to look like here,” Gleason told Arax. “We’ll have to get smaller or smarter.”
But Jimmy Anderson, the district’s largest landowner with 5,000 acres, executed a board takeover, installed himself as president, and altered the definition of “irrigated acres” from land planted and watered year after year to any tract that had been irrigated for a single season over the past decade. The change expanded the district’s irrigated acreage from 14,000 to 22,000, with Anderson and his kin controlling 5,000 of the new acres. Under state groundwater law, each irrigated acre earns a credit. Anderson’s credits amount to 1.5 billion gallons of water per year, which he can bank or sell.
Anderson is selling water credits at $200 per acre-foot. The buyers include Gleason and his farming partner, Brian Whelan, who told Arax they have already wired Anderson $200,000 for 1,000 acre-feet — enough to irrigate their pistachios for the current growing season. “Jimmy’s got us over a barrel,” Gleason said. “Until we can build a pipeline to bring in water, we have to pay him to keep farming.”
Whelan said Anderson’s “irrigated” lands include more than 3,000 acres that have long been barren, and called the arrangement “farming water.” They plan to file a lawsuit.
In the essay, Anderson dismissed the criticism: “The Johnnies-come-lately are the ones who pumped our little aquifer dry. They bought the land for cheap and planted it wall to wall with pistachios. They knew it couldn’t last.”
The essay also documents the AI data center boom in Silicon Valley. Arax toured Santa Clara and San Jose with Masheika Allgood, a former Nvidia employee who now questions the AI industry’s environmental impact. “There’s absolutely no doubt that the environmental impacts of datacenters are significant,” Allgood told Arax. “But when it comes to water and electricity, we can’t peg anything down. The only answer we get from government is: ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
According to the essay, the California legislature passed a bill in September 2025 requiring data centers to disclose and certify water consumption. Newsom vetoed it, calling the measure too onerous. The governor has also vetoed other proposed AI guardrails, the essay notes.
Santa Clara’s 57 data centers now consume more than 60% of the city’s electricity, subsidized in part by higher residential rates, according to the essay. The city’s own utility, Silicon Valley Power, is tapped out. Meanwhile, San Jose is partnering with Pacific Gas & Electric in a $1.5 billion deal to triple electrical capacity over 10 years, and has created two city staff positions — paid for by PG&E — to attract up to 20 new data centers.
The essay reports that the California Energy Commission exempts data centers using no more than 100 megawatts of backup diesel power from a more rigorous review process, and that not one of the 15 data centers vetted for such exemption since 2011 has been denied.
Residents in San Jose’s Edenvale neighborhood, where a massive new data center cluster is rising, expressed frustration with the lack of environmental review. Mimi Patterson, a longtime resident, recalled efforts to protest the project in 2020: “I saw greed. I saw corruption. I saw so many of my neighbors bury their heads in the sand.”
Arax draws a parallel to the 1970s contamination from Fairchild Semiconductor, which leaked volatile organic compounds and created one of 23 Superfund sites in Santa Clara County — more than any other county in the nation.
The essay notes that Newsom, a Democrat who champions an “abundance” agenda and has called for “abundance, abundance” in housing, AI, and infrastructure, has deep ties to tech figures dating to his time as San Francisco mayor. Arax, who co-wrote Newsom’s memoir, describes the governor’s veto of the data center disclosure bill as part of a pattern: “He could speak and even act with passion to address the gravity of climate change and fight back against Trump’s ceaseless environmental assaults. But then he could turn around and embrace a paean to growth that was little more than a hunt for the next bonanza.”
The essay opens with the Gold Rush of 1848 and traces a line through hydraulic mining, industrial agriculture, and the current AI boom. “California’s eternal grab for more has never seemed so desperate,” Arax writes. “The Golden state has spun itself into a new and more menacing age of plunder: the mining of water and the mining of our minds.”