Inside the long, bitter fight over one man’s quest to build the biggest AI datacenter in California

A modern-day prospector promised rural Imperial thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue – but his plan has set off a firestorm of resistance 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,…