More than 100 recent protests across California and the U.S. over data centers represent the same fierce opposition that horse enthusiasts once mounted against Model T cars.
The times eventually change. And so, in the end, do we.
The developer behind a proposed $10 billion data center has filed a lawsuit asserting his rights to Colorado River water in California’s Imperial Valley.
Sebastian Rucci is a Huntington Beach lawyer and businessman pushing the plan in a region already known as a big water user. The Imperial Valley sprouted as an agricultural center that’s the largest user of Colorado River water in the seven states that rely on the river. Farmers use about 80% of the state’s full allocation.
The U.S. government is warning that Iranian state-backed hackers are actively breaking in and disrupting industrial control systems at American water and energy providers. This new alert comes months after federal agencies warned of an escalation in hacking from Iranian actors amid the ongoing war.
In an advisory updated Wednesday, the FBI, the NSA, the Department of Energy, and CISA said Iranian hackers were targeting programmable logic controllers on internet-connected operational networks, allowing them to manipulate data on their displays, causing outages and disruption.
Mexico says it’s finally going to hire a company to build a plant that turns the ocean into freshwater in Rosarito, reviving an idea shelved years ago amid protests that the government was privatizing water.
And, in the name of reducing how much water Mexico takes from the Colorado River, the United States is going to help get the water to the cities that need it. Construction could start as soon as Aug. 1, according to a federal Mexican project website, but the government had not yet selected a builder.
California and two other states have avoided the harshest water cutbacks the Trump administration could have imposed over the next two years to deal with the deepening crisis on the Colorado River.
The Times has learned that federal officials have agreed with an offer made earlier this year by California, Arizona and Nevada to reduce what they take from the river by at least 3.2 million acre-feet between now and the end of 2028.
Matt Barrett has seen Lake Powell drop nearly every year since 2013 or so, when he started making annual treks to the reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border. Some very snowy winters helped it rebound quickly, but this year was far from that.
“We need another one of those fast,” he said recently. “A few of those fast.”
Multi-year plans for how states will reduce Colorado River water intake could be nearing an agreement, with a federal plan expected to be released in the coming week.
Years of failed multi-state negotiations dragged the federal government into the complicated contract to decide how states would prevent a total collapse of the critical Western water source that is the Colorado River. A soon-expected Bureau of Reclamation impact statement would represent meaningful progress, but not a complete solution for the dwindling river.
The operating agreements that govern Colorado River allocations expire at the end of this year, and negotiations between the seven states that share the water are stalled. With the federal government poised to step in and impose an agreement it formulates, the states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the upper basin, and Arizona, California, and Nevada in the lower basin — have asked for more time.
Whether or not the ongoing drought on the Colorado watershed will pass, or is a permanent feature of climate change, the problem is real and acute. During the 20th century, the Colorado River delivered to its lower basin states an average flow of 14.6 million acre feet per year. At the dawn of the 21st century, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, two of the largest reservoirs in the world, were close to full, together storing over 50 million acre feet.
Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM) is suing the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) after the utility denied the company’s request for about 260 million gallons of Colorado River water per year, or roughly 750,000 gallons per day, to cool a planned 330 MW AI data center in Imperial County. The case tests whether water historically used for agriculture can be redirected to industrial projects envisioned in the county’s emerging Lithium Valley plan.
The developer says it has leased 160 acres of farmland that historically consumed about the same amount of water and plans to retire that land from production, arguing the conserved water should instead supply the proposed 950,000-square-foot campus.
Workforce concerns have ranked in the American Water Works Association (AWWA)’s top ten sector challenges for years. But in 2026, the question has shifted from how to replace retiring workers to something harder: how to stop institutional knowledge from disappearing with them.
When AWWA published its 2026 State of the Water Industry report in March, workforce emerged once again as one of the most pressing concerns facing utilities across the United States. With 21% of employees eligible to retire within five years and vacancy rates averaging 9%, the scale of the challenge is hard to ignore. We sat down with AWWA CEO David LaFrance to dig deeper into what the data is really telling us, and what the sector needs to do to prepare.
