It’s no secret that Arizona is worried about its water. The Colorado River is drying up, in part due to climate change, and groundwater aquifers are running dry. Some of the state’s biggest industries are suffering as a result: Many farmers have been forced to rip up their cotton and alfalfa fields, and some home developers have been blocked from building new subdivisions.
A state with hydrologic woes of this magnitude would seem an unlikely place to attract new factory-scale industries, which often have substantial water appetites themselves, but over the past year that’s exactly what’s happened. So-called hyperscaler tech companies like Microsoft and Meta have swarmed in to build the data centers fuelling the artificial-intelligence boom, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has spent billions of dollars on a factory complex outside Phoenix. This rapid development has triggered fears that the industry will suck up the finite water supplies available to residents of Phoenix and Tucson.
So far, however, these predictions have not come true. Even thou... Read more
