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PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Arizona’s top prosecutor says it’s time to stop building new data centers — at least for now.
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Attorney General Kris Mayes announced Monday that she’s asking state lawmakers and Gov. Katie Hobbs to pass a law pausing approval of new data centers, especially large-scale “hyperscale” AI projects.
Her reasoning: electricity bills are climbing, and the federal government just slashed Arizona’s Colorado River water allocation by nearly 30%.
“The only sane thing to do is to pause the approval of new data centers,” she said in a written statement. “Data centers are power- and water-intensive, and Arizona is challenged on both fronts right now.”
In Pinal County last week, the Board of Supervisors voted down a rezoning request for a large-scale data center after residents packed the meeting in opposition. That vote effectively killed the project.
Mayes says cooling data centers can burn through tens to hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year, and the power plants built to serve them need water too.
Her office points to a 2025 analysis by Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit, estimating that if every planned project in the greater Phoenix area gets built, data center-related water demand there could jump more than 450%.
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Mayes says even data centers that skip water-based cooling aren’t off the hook, citing an Arizona State University study that found they can raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees.
“Arizona may be one of the most exposed states in the country to the negative impacts of excessive data center development,” Mayes added. “We owe it to our communities, homeowners, and future generations of Arizonans to better manage our water and power needs before any new data center approvals are issued.”
Mayes said data center projects have drawn significant opposition in some communities, including Pinal County and Ahwatukee, where neighbors near a planned 1 million-square-foot data center say they didn’t grasp the potential impacts when the project was approved two years ago.
Mayes will hold a town hall in Ahwatukee on Oct. 14 to hear from community members concerned about the planned hyperscale data center project.
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