Deep in the dry desert of Southern California, two ends of a rope are being pulled to decide not only the fate of a small rural community but also who holds power in California’s AI future.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” – Mark Twain
For decades, large industrial projects in the United States have been disproportionately placed in minority communities with low incomes. Environmental justice research shows these communities as increasingly suffering the burdens of pollution and irksome infrastructure, while receiving fewer long-term economic benefits. Consequently, AI data centers are the new iteration of an old governance problem: industrial red-zoning
As California champions the fields of climate policy, tech innovation, and progressive governance, there is a growing contradiction between ambitious tech growth and its uneven local impacts. Our state now faces a difficult question: Will technological progress be governed democratically or imposed unevenly on the communities with the least power to resist it?
I have seen the latter firsthand.
My home of Imperial County, located in the southeastern corner of California, is in the midst of such a conflict, where a massive 950,000-square-foot AI data center has been proposed to be erected on 74 acres of land near residential homes with the backing of Imperial Valley Manufacturing, LLC.
Imperial County was not chosen by accident. Rural regions like Imperial County offer developers key advantages: there is cheap land and even cheaper regulation. More demand for AI infrastructure means more developers seeking communities with weak oversight.
Folks understand this, with community backlash following the project from the get go. But the real fight is not against technology; it is over who bears its burdensome costs and over who gets a free voice.
On one end of the tug is Sebastian Rucci, the lawyer behind the project, who purposefully designed the data center in a manner in which it is categorized as a ministerial development.
Under existing California law, ministerial projects must be approved if they meet technical zoning requirements, leaving elected county officials with no authority to deny them based on environmental or community concerns. This legal loophole also allows the project to ignore the California Environmental Quality Act. According to the Office of the Attorney General for the State of California, CEQA acts to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony to fulfill the social and economic requirements of present and future generations.” In essence, CEQA is one of the state’s primary tools for assessing environmental impact and ensuring transparency for projects such as the data center.
By designing the project to qualify for ministerial approval, the developers have taken the political will from the people of Imperial County and have turned it into a procedural formality.
“That is not sneaky. That’s just smart,” Rucci told KPBS in December of last year.
Rucci is a developer with no experience building, starting up, or operating a data center.
Rucci did not respond for comment.
While developers have relied on legal classifications to push their interests, on the other end of the tug lies residents and organizers who will not go quietly into the night. Grassroots resistance to the data center has emerged across Imperial Valley, led in part by Valle Imperial Resiste and Not In My Backyard Imperial.
“They have the money, we got the people.” | Image Source: Maria Renee Johnson
Many residents found out about the proposed data center through social media. Francisco Leal, one of the leads for NIMBYI explained how such a consequential project was discovered in the community.
“We saw a Facebook post by the City of Imperial where they were telling the community that there was a proposed AI data center…[the] first question was ‘what is a data center?’ and ‘how do AI data centers work with communities?’”
Determined to reclaim a voice in the decisions that could reshape their communities, increased demonstrations, public meetings, and social media campaigns have sought to slow the project and force transparency in the approval process.
The City of Imperial has also filed legal challenges seeking to require environmental review before the project can proceed. The City argues that the data center would extend beyond the narrow technical criteria used to justify its ministerial classification.
“The consensus is that nobody wants it: nobody from the community, nobody that does not have a financial interest wants it…. We want to hear from our elected officials [because] what are you doing?” Leal said.
For organizers like Leal, the struggle represents more than a single development project. It is evidence of a broader pattern in rural communities like Imperial County, where large-scale industrial infrastructure can be built quickly and quietly without the scrutiny or resistance such projects may face in wealthier, more politically-influential regions.
The lawsuit has not gone unchallenged. In January, the developers of the proposed center countersued the City for obstruction, alleging that the City was purposefully derailing the data center.
Each protest, legal suit, and social media post are all another pull on the consequential rope.
“We live in a very sickly, historically disenfranchised community, who have been utilized time and time again as a sacrifice zone,” Gilberto Manzanarez, the founder and lead organizer of Valle Imperial Resiste, said.
This tug of war has also caught the eyes of folks in Sacramento, 632 miles away from Imperial County. State Senator Steve Padilla has called for greater transparency and introduced legislation that would require environmental review for all future data center projects. Although not Imperial-specific, the bill reflects growing recognition among lawmakers that existing regulatory frameworks may not be suited to govern the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure.
Taking a step back, we must explore how this fight over accountability and AI infrastructure began. Supporters of the growing AI boom like to frame its expansion as inevitable, as a necessary consequence of technological progress in our modern world.
This frames data centers not as political choices but as systemic requirements of innovation, as beyond the scope of democratic deliberation.
Inevitability gives power to those who wish to compress timelines and force agendas onto the public. The result? Not the absence of politics but its concealment, where community decisions are made through legal classifications rather than public consent. Yet, inevitability is not a natural foregone conclusion; it is a malicious political construct sold to us.
What is happening in Imperial County is reflective of a deeper flaw in how technological expansion is governed, once more the same haunting tune of industrialism hums through the broken ground. Too often are communities consulted, but never empowered. Public meetings may be held, notices of what is happening posted, and procedural requirements all met, but meaningful democratic participation remains limited.
Real democracy is a verb, not a noun. It is not just formal compliance but an active process. Consent in government requires what can be understood as the four C’s: clear, conscious, continuous, and coercion-free. Communities must be clearly informed about the scope and consequences of even proposed projects, consciously participating in decision making with the ability to influence outcomes, rather than just observe them. And consent must always be continuous, never confined to a single procedural moment but sustained coercion-free throughout the lifespan of projects that have the potential to reshape communities and the lives of those who live in them.
Yet, structural incentives often do work against this model of democratic governance. Promises offering investment, tax revenue, economic support, and all to local governments, especially those in rural or economically disadvantaged regions, obscure the true costs and benefits of what is to follow.
As such, Imperial County can be a lesson to us all. Those without political leverage are to be presented with development as a “fait accompli:” an outcome framed as inevitable rather than negotiable.
Then what can we do? I argue the answer is not to halt technological progress but to govern it democratically. We must abolish the ministerial loophole that allows major infrastructure to bypass environmental review, restore transparency, and ensure communities are fully informed before decisions are made. In the case of my home in Imperial County, the community should continue fighting for a moratorium and halt the project until these goals are achieved as well as elect members of the community who believe in reform and do not just preach it. If the data center is found to be lawful and not a risk to the community, then so be it. As of now, they have not even been given that basic courtesy.
“It is impossible for [the developers] to fathom the idea of citizens actually doing this, not because of an interest that we have, but because we actually care about our home,” Manzanarez said.
The only acceptable way California can lead the way in innovation is by aligning technological advancement with democratic consent, and it is up to us to stand up for our right to choose and decide. Building these guardrails ensures that we are not just told about change but have the power to shape it, consult it, and enforce it.
For innovation without accountability risks repeating old harms under new names.
Featured Image Source: Illustration by Gael De La Cruz; Project rendering by Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, LLC