It goes without saying that southern Arizona isn't replete with water. This is, after all, a region that does not equate riverbeds with flowing water. Seriously, roads were built straight through riverbeds. I'd be driven into the Salt River just to get to cello lessons.

A company’s opaque plan to build a huge datacenter outside Tucson, Arizona has roiled the desert city over the past few months, the latest US community to push back as tech companies aggressively seek to build out infrastructure for cloud computing and to power the AI boom.

The proposed datacenter, known as Project Blue, would span 290 acres in Pima county, and become the biggest development ever in the county, or anywhere in the southern part of the state.

The $3.6bn project wasn’t on most Tucsonans’ radar until 17 June, when the county board of supervisors narrowly agreed to sell and rezone a parcel of land just south-east of town to the developer Beale Infrastructure.

The San Francisco-based company hoped to get the project annexed by the city, a necessary step for it to be supplied by the public utility, Tucson Water.

But since the parcel sale agreement, the proposed center has faced stiff pushback from a community upset over the enormous amounts of water and electricity it would require, and the lack of transparency with which the developers and some in local government have pursued the project.