Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he’d been searching for – the perfect place to realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California.

The dusty expanse wasn’t an obvious location. It was in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border, where temperatures regularly rose past 100F (37.8C). Water was scarce in the once-booming agricultural area, which gets its supply from the beleaguered Colorado River. And then, there was the city of Imperial – population 22,000 – to win over. As controversial datacenter projects have sprung up across the US, residents were naturally skeptical of a new, energy-guzzling neighbor.

But for Rucci, a 66-year-old lawyer with a complicated past, none of these obstacles seemed insurmountable.

Rucci is among the new class of middlemen who inhabit the burgeoning world of datacenter development. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence – galvanized by Silicon Valley companies worth trillions of dollars – has fueled one of the biggest industrial construction booms in history. The technology requires far more computing power than traditional internet services, and that means building enormous new structures to house millions of servers.

This proliferation of datacenters is now attracting modern-day prospectors seeking land in hopes of cashing in on one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative industries on Earth. Set in their sights are areas like Imperial county: rural, underdeveloped and desperate for an economic boost.

“I didn’t know much about datacenters,” Rucci said, recalling a couple of years back. “I made calls to people I knew in Silicon Valley. And within a short period, I realized: holy shit, this stuff is huge.”

Rucci, a self-described expert at doing the tedious legwork of packaging permits and plans, proved adept at selling a bright future of economic development to county lawmakers. He said his sales skills also nabbed him a direct line to Google, which floated interest in being the tenant of the datacenter, according to emails between Rucci and county agencies.

With the promise of these potential partnerships and support from construction unions, Rucci moved into high gear last year and began plotting his nearly 1m-square-foot datacenter – a facility the size of 16 football fields combined. He said he had invested about $5m already, and, if it gets approved and passed off to a builder, he expects “big multipliers of that” in return.

What Rucci didn’t expect, however, was the firestorm of resistance his project set off in the community.

Over the past year, more than half a dozen lawsuits have been filed, along with recall efforts for local officials who supported the project. Even a temporary 45-day datacenter moratorium was approved. Echoing similar battles against such development across the US, Imperial county residents told the Guardian they fear increased emissions, harm to the region’s rare desert wildlife, constraints on the power grid and rapidly dwindling water supply, along with noise issues. Rucci denies the project will have such effects.

It seems the backlash succeeded – for now. Rucci’s developments are on pause after a county judge ruled last month that his project cannot move forward until it clears an extensive environmental review. Despite a bold start, Rucci could end up a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when a businessman moves too fast without community buy-in.

“This project was presented as a Noah’s Ark that’s going to come save everybody,” said Francisco Leal, who lives in a residential neighborhood across the street from Rucci’s proposed datacenter. “But the community sees this project as a Trojan horse.”

From strip club owner to datacenter developer

When Rucci landed on that vast plot of land in Imperial county in late 2024, only two things really mattered: finding a location that could be exempted from California’s strict environmental building requirements, and getting his hands on a lot of electricity. In unincorporated Imperial county, he had both.

Because the land was zoned for industrial use, he was able to apply for an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which would fast-track the project by avoiding the environmental permitting process. And for electricity, Rucci was able to work with the local energy provider to eventually get 330 megawatts of electricity – enough to power a city the size of Tallahassee.

Rucci is based in Huntington Beach, but has started several businesses throughout southern California, St Louis and Ohio. In early 2025, he said one of his connections introduced him to a longtime Google employee who helped guide him through the process. In a July email to Imperial county’s planning and development services, Rucci wrote that the datacenter would “enable Google to conduct artificial intelligence and large language model training for its Gemini system”, Google’s suite of AI models.

“We have secured interest from Google for this project, which we are confident will transform the area through increased tax revenues, new employment opportunities, and expanded energy production,” Rucci wrote in another email in August to the county’s air pollution control district.

“We are not involved in a datacenter project in Imperial county,” said a Google spokesperson. She did not respond to questions about the company’s relationship with Rucci. He said Google’s response made sense considering they do not have a formal agreement.

While California has dozens of datacenters capable of cloud computing, streaming and internet searches, the state has scant facilities dedicated to AI. That’s because California is one of the most rigorous states when it comes to environmental permitting for energy and water-intensive facilities such as AI datacenters.

Major projects in California take an average of seven years to get completed, said Michael Thomas, the founder of Cleanview, which tracks datacenter development. For comparison, the average in Texas is about three years. Thomas said he had seen a surge of new players, like Rucci, get into AI datacenter development nationwide. These people, he said, were willing to take on the risk and find ways to speed up the process.

“Land and power have become so scarce at the scale that these big tech companies need,” Thomas said. So, if a developer can shorten the timeline, “a company like Google or Microsoft or Meta may be willing to pay you a huge premium … It’s potentially a way to make millions of dollars very quickly.”

Rucci is no stranger to taking on risk. He has owned a strip club, addiction treatment centers and dozens of accounting and real estate endeavors. In 2010, while operating the strip club, Go Go Cabaret, he was convicted on four counts of illegal liquor sales for which he had to serve a 30-day jail sentence. He was also charged with engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, money laundering and promoting prostitution, but those charges were later dismissed. In 2019, California suspended his license to practice law for nearly three years.

He has also filed for corporate bankruptcy at least twice. The most recent time, in 2023, took place after the Department of Justice investigated one of his addiction treatment centers for alleged fraud, ending with a government seizure of $600,000 of assets. No criminal charges were filed, however, and that money was later returned with interest after Rucci sued the government to reclaim the seized funds.

Since zeroing in on Imperial county in 2024, Rucci has registered several new businesses related to the vast datacenter campus, from construction and energy supply to ongoing operations. The umbrella company for his project is an LLC called Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM). Rucci says the facility will bring in more than 1,600 construction jobs and nearly $30m in annual tax revenue. It will also include an electrical substation, on-site battery energy storage and more than 130 methane-gas-fueled generators, according to an application submitted to the county planning department.

Rucci said his diverse experience was well-suited for such a complicated project. “That doesn’t mean that my background isn’t colorful,” he said. “I’ve challenged cities. I fought the federal government. I’ve done a lot of stuff. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to process this and get it through.”

Battle lines

At first, Leal had no clue that the dusty 75 acres of land across the street from his house had been bought by a developer. It wasn’t until the day before Thanksgiving last year when he found a colorful flyer hanging from his door that his world began to swirl around him. The flyer mapped out the huge project and warned that construction was moving forward without requiring the state’s usual environmental review.

Leal began scanning the internet, and what he found shocked him. His back fence was all that separated his home from Rucci’s property. While Leal lived in Imperial city, the datacenter would fall just outside city limits on unincorporated county land. It was clear that living next to this facility would permanently change the quiet life he and his wife had envisioned when they moved there some 20 years earlier.

“When we bought that house, we planned for it to be the house where we would retire, where our kids would grow up and return when they visit,” Leal said. “The quality of life of anybody living half a mile from the datacenter will be affected.”

He started texting his neighbors that same day. As word spread, people began to organize, holding meetings and rallies against the datacenter proposal. Within months, close to 3,500 people would sign a petition opposing the facility, and state senator Steve Padilla, who represents the district, would sound the alarm, introducing a series of bills aimed at datacenters.

As AI datacenters have popped up around the world, they’ve come under scrutiny for being extremely resource-intensive. A query through chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a typical internet search, and that number can increase for more complicated prompts. Because supercomputers run hot, they typically need extensive water-cooling systems.

Imperial county is a critical habitat for wildlife like the desert pupfish, which is listed as an endangered species under the California Endangered Species Act and swims through agricultural drains and canals, much like one that crosses Rucci’s property. Other desert animals of concern include the flat-tailed horned lizard, yellow-breasted chat and burrowing owls.

As Leal got more involved in the datacenter fight, he met other concerned residents, like Christopher Scurries. Scurries lives nearby and is a music teacher at Imperial high school. He said he was worried about datacenter noise, what’s known as a constant low hum. “I’ll definitely hear when I’m here in my house,” he said. Scurries and his wife moved to the area in 2017 so they could afford a home. Now with a two-year-old daughter, his previously pleasant life feels uncertain in the shadow of the datacenter.

It’s testament to a long-simmering sentiment in this corner of the Sonoran desert, where pollutants from agriculture and industry, along with poverty, have long taken an undue toll. One in five adults is unemployed in the region and the poverty rate, at close to 20%, is the highest in California.

“The benefits these structures may bring into a community – the jobs, tax revenue, even the infrastructure improvements – may feel uncertain or uneven compared to the scale of the impact,” said Carla Walker, the US director of environmental justice and equity at the research organization World Resources Institute. “Communities are asking these questions of who benefits and who pays the price.”

For Jacob Rodriguez, who was born and raised in the area, who pays the price has been top of mind. “It’s an existential threat,” he said of the datacenter project, noting that residents had long dealt with pollution and dwindling water supplies. “The respiratory problems and the air quality here are already abysmal … eventually, indirectly, this will cost lives.”

‘I’m not here to run for Miss America’

By March, tensions between Rucci and the community had reached a boiling point. At an Imperial county board of supervisors meeting, dozens of residents, including Leal and Scurries, packed into the chambers for a public feedback session. As Rucci stood at the lectern, trying to present his more than 100 slides on the project, the crowd steadily chanted “no datacenters” and waved “not in my backyard” signs. It got so raucous that Rucci, the main speaker on the schedule, left the meeting early.

As he walked out of the building, protesters yelled “Fuera, Rucci, fuera” (“leave” in Spanish). Visibly fed up, Rucci unexpectedly approached a person screaming through a bullhorn and roared in their face.

By this point, the project was at the center of a heated legal battle. The city of Imperial had sued the county for bypassing public input and environmental reviews when it approved the datacenter (the environmental nonprofit Sierra Club later joined on). Rucci, in turn, counter-sued in federal court on behalf of his company IVCM, alleging the city carried out a “bad-faith campaign of administrative obstruction and targeted retaliation”.

He then went on to sue an anti-datacenter activist named Jake Tison, the Comité Cívico del Valle non-profit, and its executive director, Luis Olmedo, and the local public-media news station KPBS and one of its reporters, Kori Suzuki, for defamation. Those three defamation suits were dismissed. Rucci has appealed in the cases against KPBS and Comité Cívico del Valle and is working to reverse the ruling on Tison.

“Look, I’m not here to run for Miss America or Mr America,” Rucci said. “I’m here to do a datacenter.”

Rucci, on behalf of IVCM, also sued the local utility, the Imperial irrigation district, for rejecting an application for water to cool the datacenter. The utility’s sole source of water is the drought-stricken Colorado River. The AI facility would need about 750,000 gallons of water a day, according to Rucci.

He says the water the datacenter would use is equivalent to a 160-acre farm, of which there are several in the area. The utility’s officials, however, voiced concerns about how the project would affect residents. Karin Euenio, one of the utility’s directors, wrote in an op-ed: “I believe it is my duty to speak up when a proposal raises serious concerns about ratepayers, reliability, and community wellbeing.”

The tumult continued through the spring and summer, with Rucci’s IVCM spending $30,000 in a campaign to back his company spokesperson, Carlos Duran, to fill the seat of one of the utility district’s directors. He lost.

For its part, the community instigated its own political organizing efforts with a recall campaign of Peggy Price, the chair of Imperial county’s board of supervisors who has been supportive of the datacenter. That campaign is ongoing.

While things had been looking good for Rucci after he got county approval for the project in April, it took a drastic turn over the last month. The judge presiding over the city’s lawsuit ruled Rucci must go back to square one for the entire approval process. That means before breaking ground, the datacenter must clear lengthy environmental reviews to assess its impact on the power grid, water supply and emissions.

Alene Taber, a lawyer representing Imperial, said these reviews could take a year or more and that alternative locations for the datacenter would have to be taken into consideration. She said it was meaningful “that there [will be] a transparent, public, environmental process”.

Rucci, however, said he was not deterred and is going to challenge the judge’s ruling. “It’ll be just a matter of time,” he said. “I’m not going away.”