TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Plans for the Project Blue datacenter near the Pima County Fairgrounds attracted strong, persistent protests that are still going on. Now there’s a chance another large data center could go up—at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Military bases tend to be on really big pieces of land. In the case of an Air Force base, by the time you get the runway and all the support buildings, there might be substantial parcels of vacant space. So the Air Force looked at the land on the western edge of DM and said ”You know, you could put a data center there.”
Modern data centers are big. Project Blue, planned for construction near I-10 and Houghton is slated for about 290 acres of land.
The Federal Government wants to make it easier to build data centers, so it’s inviting companies to lease land at Davis-Monthan and four other Air Force bases if they use the land for data centers.
Besides Davis-Monthan the bases offered for datacenters are:
Arnold Air Force Base, Tennessee,
Edwards Air Force Base, California,
Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey
Robins Air Force Base, Georgia
In the case of DM, about three hundred acres is available on the western edge of the base, adjacent to an industrial area that includes a Tucson Electric Power plant.
Part of the objection to the Project Blue data center was that it would use too much power and too much water for cooling—especially in Tucson’s desert environment. The Tucson City Council refused to annex the Project Blue site and refused to provide water for cooling.
Developers say they’ll build Project Blue anyway using air cooling instead of water.
Project Blue’s opponents like Lee Ziesche of No Desert Data Centers say they don’t want a data center on Air Force land either.
“We just heard about it. We've got another big project we’re fighting so we’re figuring out what mechanisms we have as a community to stop that as well.”
Convincing City Council not to provide water may have no effect on a data center on Davis- Monthan. The base uses well water. State water regulators could have a say in whether increased pumping by the base could affect the City of Tucson’s water supplies. The Air Force wants any bidder to show how they’d make sure a data center has enough water and power.
