Sebastian Rucci wants to move Imperial Valley’s Colorado River water to cool his 330-megawatt data center.
It is true, in the narrow sense in which such things are usually true, that California needs more data center capacity, and that somebody will build it somewhere. The trouble is that “somewhere” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and that “somewhere,” in Rucci’s telling, is a lot next to a Homeland Security complex on the dry side of a desert where the Colorado River is, by every available measurement, running out of water.
Rucci, 65, has sunk $5 million of his own money into a 950,000-square-foot data center on dusty lots in Imperial, California. The facility is sized at 330 megawatts — enough, at rough estimate, to power two hundred and fifty thousand homes — and proposes to use water from Imperial Valley farmland allocations to cool its cloud server racks. Rucci said he has secured “interest” in the project from Google. A Google spokesperson told the Journal: “We are not involved in a data-center project in Imperial County.” “I mean, who wants to be in the middle of all this bulls—?” Rucci said. Fair enough — but Google’s “not involved” is not accidental, and Google’s reasons, whatever they are, do not make the water question disappear.
330 megawatts is real power. It is also not, by the standards the hyperscalers are now setting, particularly large. Based on publicly reported PPAs: Microsoft’s twenty-year agreement with Constellation for the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, signed in September 2024 and expected to bring 835 megawatts back online, covers roughly two and a half times Rucci’s number for a single facility. Meta’s twenty-year agreement with the same company covers 1.1 gigawatts of the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois — three times, for one campus. Amazon sits adjacent to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. The benchmark is now the gigawatt campus, not the three-hundred-megawatt single building. Which means the question of whether a 330-megawatt facility makes sense as a piece of data-center infrastructure is not really the question. The question is whether the water and power that would run it should be allocated to it, at the scale it would consume them.
The substance of the fight over the fight.
The Imperial Irrigation District, in May, nixed Rucci’s plan to acquire farmland, fallow it, and redirect the water allocation to the data center — a move that, as other communities have discovered when critical infrastructure turns against developer interests, carries real political cost. The Imperial County Board of Supervisors, which Rucci says enthusiastically welcomed his proposal last year, voted for a 45-day freeze on data projects in June and extended it to a year in July. Rucci has sued over the moratorium. The Sierra Club has separately filed suit to force a full environmental review. His defamation claim against the local public-television station was dismissed earlier this month; the judge wrote that the claim “is not legally or factually supported.” A defamation suit against a local activist was also dismissed. He is currently litigating, in some combination, against the county, the IID, the news station, the activist, and state Senator Steve Padilla — a Democrat from Chula Vista whose district stretches from the coast to the desert, who has introduced bills to regulate data center building and pass energy-upgrade costs onto developers, and whom Rucci has publicly called “a buffoon.” “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Padilla said. “I’ve never seen someone, a developer who has that sort of experience and perspective and approach.”
The numbers Rucci is pitching — $28 million in annual tax revenue, 1,600 construction jobs at the build — are real numbers. They are the same numbers every data center pitch makes. They do not address the cost the IID would bear if the water were transferred — to the farms that would be fallowed, to the farmworkers who would be displaced, and to the Salton Sea ecosystem that already absorbs the drainage from Imperial Valley agriculture and is, by every measurement, in worse shape than the Colorado itself.
The local opposition is more credible than Rucci’s framing allows. Christopher Scurries, a high-school band director who lives behind the proposed site, googled Rucci — and found a record that, on its face, is the record of a man who does not have a background in, among other things, building large-scale data center infrastructure. Rucci owned an Ohio strip club called Go Go Girls Cabaret and was charged, though not convicted, with money laundering and promoting prostitution. He spent 30 days in jail for selling beer without a license (a case he calls politically motivated, a characterization the now-retired prosecutor disputes). He ran California Palms Addiction Recovery Campus, a drug-treatment center that was the subject of a federal probe focused on Medicaid billing; no charges were filed, but the U.S. government did seize $600,000 from the operation, which it later returned. Rucci said he forced the government to return the money. What the record shows is a man who has been in fights before and will be in them again. Scurries formed an opposition group, Not In My Backyard Imperial, wrote a folk song calling Rucci “super douchey,” and pressed the Board toward the moratorium. A NIMBY Imperial member was arrested at the April board vote; the charges were later dropped. “[R]ecall campaigns have targeted officials over data center approvals](/articles/2026-07-03-recall-campaigns-target-officials-over-data-center-approvals/). [T]he real story here is that Rucci’s position in Imperial is not fundamentally different from the position of the other players in the saga. What he wants is to be allowed to do what the people who urge the county to build — the data center developers, the water engineers, the lobbyists — want to be allowed to do, which is to take public water and turn it into a private input to cool servers.
The data center fight, to the extent it is one, is not really about data centers, which, as this publication has reported, sit at the point where Cold War-era water law and contemporary infrastructure co-locate uneasily, and what the state does with them matters least of all. All that does is clinch the case made by Scurries and others: The question the people of Imperial have to ask themselves is not whether they want a data center — they probably do — but whether the cloud computing apparatus that powers the digital lives of two hundred and fifty thousand strangers ought to come with the costs of the allocations that would feed it, and if not, whether they are willing to tell it so.
The affirmative case that Rucci is making in court is, at its core, a claim that he has spent enough money and survived enough harassment to be allowed to go forward, which is a claim that has not, in any other context, been recognized as an entitlement to public resources. “Rucci said he has sunk $5 million of his own money into the project and vowed not to back down, declaring: ‘Just give me my damn data center.’ ‘Rucci’ does not want a hearing — he wants a result, and the IID said no in May. The Board of Supervisors said not yet in June. A judge said his defamation suit against the local station was unsupported. The thresholds are the only part of the regulatory process the developer — any developer — has ever respected.
“Rucci said he learned about data centers from YouTube and by calling people in Silicon Valley,” the Journal report says. Rucci is not, in the strict sense, the person the county is dealing with — Google may be, or may not be, and the question of who led who to the table is not explained by Rucci’s account. What is documented is that Google said it is “not involved in a data-center project in Imperial County,” which is not nothing but is also not a claim about the project’s domestic water use. The $90 figure for a gallon of Colorado River water does not exist, but the allocation does, and the crisis the allocation is designed to manage runs deeper than the developer’s bid.
The question dense data centers are asking everywhere, the question at the center of every fight in every county that has seen one proposed: [W]ho pays the bill? Democrats have begun to turn against their own party’s leaders over data center approvals, and what used to be a standard yes-or-no for local officials has become anything but. Padilla’s legislation — to regulate data center construction and require developers to fund energy upgrades — is the policy instrument that answers the question he is posing. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, speaking to Rucci’s project and approach. “I’ve never seen someone, a developer who has that sort of experience and perspective and approach.” Rucci, for his part, called Padilla “a buffoon” — but what the Senator is actually saying is that the pain of the buildout should fall on those who profit from it, not on the ratepayers and communities wedged between the need for more cloud capacity and the cost of providing it.
The water. This one cuts deeper — no pun intended, but appropriate — because the Colorado River question is not a question about power or transmission, it is a question about allocation, and the allocation has been wrong for a long time and is getting wronger by the year. The IID’s water allocation is not a theoretical issue; it is a matter of compact and litigation, and the seven states and Mexico and the native tribes that depend on the Colorado River are, on this issue, not convinced that the acre-feet Rucci would fallow ought to be re-allocated to cooling servers. Having proposed to do exactly that, Rucci sued the IID and backed a candidate for its board — a race he lost to a longtime incumbent. The IID said no. The question now is whether any of it matters.
“Just give me my damn data center.” Rucci is, on the public record, the man who said it, and he said it in a way that should be noted — not because it makes him right, but because it captures the argument being made by the developer more clearly than any euphemism about jobs or tax revenue that has accompanied it. What he is asking for is public water, compact-allocated, overdrawn, fought over for a century — the water that irrigates Yuma lettuce and Imperial melon, that sustains the Salton Sea, that is all there is and will be for a long time to come.
Rucci’s billing as a developer of data centers does not begin to equip him for the fight, and using that fight to then split the difference, as courts tell him he cannot, and as voters are beginning to tell their elected officials they will not tolerate, makes the point more clearly than any brief filed against him. “Just give me my damn data center” is the line of a developer — any developer — who has been told no and means to reverse it. What comes next will be heard in court, and in the IID boardroom, and in the halls of the California legislature. The moratorium is in place. The Sierra Club’s suit is pending. The next election is TBD. And Rucci is still there, still spending, still litigating, still asking for water that is not his to take, all while the river that made the valley what it is — all it was — continues to run short.