Tract Buckeye and Microsoft Goodyear

The second-largest cluster in the country

Map: Phoenix West Valley data-center footprint

In September 2025, Business Insider published an investigation based on diesel-generator air permits pulled from state records across the United States.¹ The investigation found 329 data-center facilities in Northern Virginia, the country’s largest market, and 48 in Maricopa County, the second-largest. The ranking places metropolitan Phoenix ahead of Silicon Valley, ahead of Dallas, and ahead of Chicago. It also names a constituency: every APS residential customer whose electricity bill has climbed since 2023 now lives inside the second-ranked data-center market in the country, in a county where the political economy of water allocation has reorganized itself around industrial cooling.

The 48 Maricopa County facilities do not distribute themselves evenly across the county. The heaviest concentration runs along State Route 303 and the Buckeye corridor in the west valley, where land is cheap, zoning is permissive, and a planned 500-kilovolt transmission upgrade from the Palo Verde nuclear generating station promises enough power to run campuses of a scale no urban neighborhood could absorb.² Tract’s 2,069-acre Buckeye Tech Corridor and Microsoft’s 279-acre campus in Goodyear anchor the two largest projects in that corridor. Together they represent approximately 2,348 acres of what was, before 2020, a mix of desert scrub, Hassayampa sub-basin recharge land, and the western edge of one of the most rapidly growing Mexican-American suburban regions in the American Southwest.³

The communities within five miles of these campuses carry a demographic signature the atlas has encountered before. Avondale is 54 percent Hispanic. Western Maryvale is over 70 percent Hispanic. Goodyear’s western subdivisions are 32 percent Hispanic and growing.¹ The workers who built the Phoenix west valley across the 1990s and 2000s, the roofers and framers and electricians who followed the housing boom out along Interstate 10, settled in precisely the municipalities where the data-center corridor is now being built. Their children and grandchildren are the households the 2023 ADWR groundwater moratorium has frozen out of the region’s next generation of housing.⁴

The Gila River Indian Community, whose 653,500-acre-foot annual water allocation under the Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004 represents the largest and senior tribal water settlement in Arizona’s history, holds its reservation boundary approximately twelve miles southeast of the Tract Buckeye site.⁵ The community’s senior position in the basin makes every industrial groundwater draw in the Hassayampa sub-basin a matter of tribal water law, not only a matter of state utility regulation.

What the moratorium revealed

Map: ADWR moratorium boundary and campus footprint

In June 2023, the Arizona Department of Water Resources released a groundwater model update showing that the Phoenix Active Management Area’s supplies could not sustain another hundred years of growth at the rate then projected.⁴ The update triggered the Assured Water Supply rule’s enforcement mechanism. Developers who could not demonstrate a physically assured 100-year water supply for new subdivisions found their projects blocked. Roughly 40,000 planned housing units in western Maricopa County, nearly all of them in communities planned to house Hispanic and working-class families priced out of Scottsdale and the east valley, went into a moratorium.⁶

The moratorium applied to residential development. It did not apply to industrial development. Data centers, classified under industrial zoning, drew from the same Hassayampa sub-basin aquifer under allocations that Arizona’s water law treats as a separate track from the Assured Water Supply rule that governs housing.⁴ Tract’s Buckeye Tech Corridor announced its 1.8-gigawatt campus three months after the moratorium began, with a water allocation capped at 2,000 acre-feet per year, averaging 1.78 million gallons per day, secured from the Hassayampa sub-basin.² Microsoft’s Goodyear campus, operating since 2020, had already drawn water from the same basin through an APS service connection that pre-dated the moratorium.³

The political inversion this allocation asymmetry produces is precise. A Mexican-American family in Avondale who wanted to buy a newly built home in Buckeye in 2024 could not do so because no developer could demonstrate a 100-year water supply for the subdivision. A data-center operator who wanted to cool a server room in Buckeye in 2024 could do so under a water allocation the state had not blocked. The families who grew up in the west valley, and whose parents and grandparents built it, face the restriction. The operators who arrived after 2020 face the allocation.

The Hassayampa sub-basin is the mechanism. It underlies both the residential parcels and the industrial parcels. It does not distinguish between a household tap and a cooling tower. The aquifer model that produced the moratorium treated every gallon of new residential demand as a threat to the 100-year supply. The same model did not apply its logic to the industrial draws already permitted or subsequently approved.⁵ Western Resource Advocates documented this asymmetry in a 2025 multi-state impact report that placed Maricopa County in its top tier of data-center water-risk jurisdictions.⁷

The moratorium had a nominal endpoint. In October 2025, EPCOR Water, a private utility serving portions of the Phoenix metropolitan fringe, received what the Arizona Department of Water Resources called the first Alternative Designation of Assured Water Supply.⁸ The designation certified that EPCOR had secured enough imported Colorado River water to satisfy the 100-year supply test for its service area, ending the residential building freeze for roughly 37,000 of the blocked units. The cost of that imported water will flow to EPCOR ratepayers over the life of the supply contracts, a cost assignment the Arizona Residential Utility Consumer Office has described as an unreviewed public subsidy to private homebuilders.⁹

The moratorium period, from June 2023 to November 2025, lasted twenty-nine months. During those twenty-nine months, Tract announced its Buckeye campus, Microsoft continued construction of its Goodyear buildings, and APS filed for the 500-kilovolt transmission upgrade whose route crosses farmland south of the Maricopa County Highway 85 corridor.¹⁰ ADWR froze the homes. The campuses it did not freeze.

The rate case and the grid

Map: APS service territory and planned 500-kilovolt corridor

Arizona Public Service is the investor-owned utility that serves the Phoenix metropolitan area, including all of western Maricopa County. APS is regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission, a five-member elected body whose rate cases determine what APS charges residential customers and how the utility recovers the capital costs of new infrastructure.¹⁰ The data-center corridor in Buckeye and Goodyear has produced two distinct cost pressures on APS residential ratepayers: a generation and transmission expansion whose capital costs the utility recovers through base rates, and a shift in load profile that raises costs for residential customers while data-center operators negotiate large-load contracts at lower per-kilowatt-hour rates.

APS residential bills rose 11.2 percent between 2023 and 2025.¹⁰ The Arizona Capitol Times, reporting on the rate case filed in early 2026, documented a gap between what data-center operators pay per megawatt-hour and what a household in Avondale pays. APS has proposed a rate structure for large industrial loads, specifically campuses drawing above 50 megawatts, that recovers the cost of new transmission through a surcharge applied across all customer classes rather than as a dedicated large-load fee.¹¹ The Arizona Residential Utility Consumer Office has opposed that structure in every data-center docket since 2024, arguing that residential customers should not subsidize transmission built to serve a customer class that pays a lower effective rate.¹²

The transmission need is real. Tract’s 1.8-gigawatt Buckeye campus, at full build, would draw more power than the entire city of Tucson consumes on a peak summer day. APS has proposed a new 500-kilovolt transmission line from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, approximately thirty miles west of the Buckeye site, to serve the data-center corridor.² The right-of-way runs through agricultural land and desert parcels in western Maricopa County and through communities that APS has not formally consulted about the siting.

Microsoft’s Goodyear campus, the more established of the two anchor facilities, drew 153,000 gallons of water per day through buildings 1 through 3, then began building buildings 4 and 5 with air-cooled infrastructure that eliminates evaporative cooling consumption entirely.³ The air-cooling pivot reflects the same water constraint the moratorium made visible: a company with Microsoft’s engineering resources concluded that securing 153,000 gallons per day through a desert utility was a greater operational risk than redesigning the cooling plant. The retrofit is not altruism. It is a hedge against the water supply variability the company’s own risk models produced.

Tract’s campus faces the same constraint at a scale four orders of magnitude larger. The 2,000-acre-foot annual water cap the company negotiated with Buckeye and the Hassayampa sub-basin manager translates to 1.78 million gallons per day at average consumption, or roughly 11.6 times the Microsoft Goodyear water draw through buildings 1 through 3.² At that volume, the campus draws as much water as a municipality of roughly 24,000 households. The City of Buckeye’s population was approximately 105,000 in 2023. Tract’s campus, on one site, will consume water at a rate equal to nearly a quarter of the city’s residential base, from the same sub-basin the state decided cannot support 40,000 more homes.⁶

The Business Insider investigation documented that Maricopa County’s 48 data-center facilities collectively represent a capital investment and a power demand whose scale the Arizona Corporation Commission has not addressed as a unified portfolio.¹ Each facility enters the ACC docket as a rate case affecting its specific utility connection. The cumulative effect on the Phoenix AMA aquifer and on APS residential rates has not appeared in a single ACC proceeding. Western Resource Advocates has requested cumulative-impact analysis in comments filed across multiple ACC dockets; the requests have not produced a consolidated proceeding as of April 2026.⁷

Who fights back and what the historical record teaches

Map: Organizing groups and affected communities

The organizing tradition that confronts the Buckeye corridor builds on two institutional pillars. Poder in Action, a working-class Latino civic organization founded in Phoenix in 2015, has developed expertise in the Arizona Corporation Commission’s rate-case process that no community group in the Phoenix metropolitan area has matched.¹² The ACC’s dockets are written for utility engineers. Poder in Action learned to read them, translate them into rent and electricity-bill consequences that Avondale and Maryvale residents can name, and recruit those residents to testify at commission hearings. The method is the same method the Cooper Square Committee used before the New York City Board of Estimate in the 1960s: learn the institutional language, master the record, and bring the affected community into a room the institution designed to exclude them.

Chispa Arizona, the League of Conservation Voters’ Latina-led clean-energy affiliate, joined Poder in Action in April 2025 rural-Arizona press actions on the energy policy consequences of data-center siting.¹³ Western Resource Advocates, the Boulder-based policy and legal organization, published a 2025 multi-state water assessment that placed the Hassayampa sub-basin dynamics in a regional frame stretching from Colorado to Nevada, supplying the macro-scale water accounting that local organizing groups need when they appear before state regulators.⁷ The Arizona Residential Utility Consumer Office, a statutory body the legislature created to represent small customers before the ACC, files in every data-center docket and provides the legal standing that volunteers and advocacy groups cannot supply on their own.¹²

The Gila River Indian Community occupies a different position in the basin’s political structure. The community’s 653,500-acre-foot annual allocation under the Arizona Water Settlements Act is not merely large. It is senior. Under the prior-appropriation doctrine that governs Arizona water law, the Gila River Indian Community’s rights, settled in 2004, take priority over every non-tribal industrial allocation in the Phoenix Active Management Area. The community has not filed formal litigation against the Tract or Microsoft allocations as of April 2026, but its water rights office monitors every new industrial permit in the Hassayampa sub-basin, and its legal posture in any future shortage proceeding carries the weight of federal treaty rights against which state industrial permits have no priority.⁵

The atlas has seen this configuration before, in two places.

The San Pedro essay describes how Japanese-American fishermen on Terminal Island and Mexican-American cannery workers in Wilmington both lost their communities to the Harbor Freeway project, but not before the UCAPAWA labor local that organized across ethnic lines built a record of who worked where, at what wages, and under what conditions. That record became the evidentiary basis for the longshoremen’s organizing victories of the 1950s. The San Pedro case teaches that multi-ethnic coalitions, built across communities with different legal standing and different political access, can produce a documentary record that outlasts the immediate defeat. Poder in Action and the Gila River Indian Community are not identical to UCAPAWA’s cannery workers and the Terminal Island fishermen, but they occupy an analogous structural position: a Latino civic organization with ACC standing and a tribal government with senior water rights, fighting the same industrial expansion from two different legal platforms.

The West Side of San Antonio essay documents HemisFair ‘68 as a case in which civic boosterism converted a dense Mexican-American neighborhood into an exposition ground on the argument that modernization required clearance. The families who lost their blocks to HemisFair received no assurance that the infrastructure the city would subsequently build, the freeways, the convention hotels, the commercial development, would deliver any benefit to those displaced. The Phoenix west valley is not HemisFair. But the argument the data-center industry makes to Buckeye and Goodyear city councils, the jobs, the tax base, the economic modernization, runs along the same groove. Buckeye and Goodyear city councils have promised the west valley’s Mexican-American communities that data-center expansion will generate jobs their residents can fill. The research on data-center employment density suggests otherwise: a hyperscale campus of 2,348 acres employs perhaps 200 to 500 people in permanent positions, while consuming water and power that hundreds of thousands of residents cannot access on equal terms.⁷

The current regulatory moment presents a specific tool.

The 2023 ADWR moratorium is not only a constraint. It is also a regulatory instrument that community organizers and tribal water attorneys are already using. Every time APS files a rate case that recovers transmission costs from residential customers, RUCO and Poder in Action have an opportunity to force the commission to allocate those costs explicitly to the data-center load that generated them.¹¹ Every time a new industrial groundwater permit application touches the Hassayampa sub-basin, the Gila River Indian Community’s water rights office can file as a formal commenter, invoking its senior allocation under the 2004 settlement. The moratorium made the aquifer constraint visible. The organizing groups are now using the constraint as a lever.

The APS rate case filed in 2026 is the most immediate forum. RUCO has asked the Arizona Corporation Commission to require APS to demonstrate, in a separate cost-of-service analysis, what portion of the 500-kilovolt transmission upgrade costs are attributable to data-center load growth versus normal residential load growth.¹⁰ If the commission accepts that framework, it establishes a precedent under which large-load infrastructure costs must be allocated to the customer class that created them. The precedent would apply to every future data-center transmission request in APS territory.

The homebuilder litigation adds a second front. In January 2025, a coalition of Arizona homebuilders filed suit challenging the ADWR groundwater rules that produced the moratorium, arguing the rules exceeded the agency’s statutory authority.¹⁴ The litigation has the potential to undo the regulatory instrument that organizers are using. The outcome matters for the water fight: if the moratorium framework survives the legal challenge, it remains available as the basis for a broader industrial-drawdown rule that would subject data-center allocations to the same 100-year assurance test applied to housing. If the framework falls, industrial groundwater allocations in the Hassayampa sub-basin become even harder to contest.[^kjzz_adwr_homebuilder]

The v6 and v7 layers of the atlas will return to the Indigenous-treaty dimension of data-center displacement. The Gila River Indian Community’s 2004 settlement is one of roughly two dozen tribal water settlements across the Colorado River Basin that are now being tested by the same industrial load growth that is straining the Phoenix Active Management Area. The Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s rights on the Truckee River in Nevada, the Pueblo of Isleta’s rights on the Rio Grande at Los Lunas, and the Ak-Chin Indian Community’s rights in Pinal County all represent senior claims whose formal legal priority has not been tested against data-center industrial draws at the scale now being proposed. When those tests come, the Gila River Indian Community’s posture in the Hassayampa sub-basin will serve as the baseline case, because Maricopa County is the second-largest data-center cluster in the country.¹

What the atlas records here is the same structural pattern it has documented across a century of urban renewal: a resource scarcity, real or managed, that is allocated by category. In 1950s Detroit, the scarcity was Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance, allocated to white neighborhoods and withheld from Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. In 1960s San Antonio, the scarcity was urban-renewal federal dollars, allocated to the HemisFair site while the displaced families received relocation checks insufficient to rent in any neighborhood that kept its blocks intact. In 2023 western Maricopa County, the scarcity is groundwater, and the allocation runs industrial before residential, data center before subdivision. The families frozen out of the Buckeye housing market are not the same families who lost their blocks in Detroit or their street corners in San Antonio. But the mechanism that freezes them is legible to anyone who has read the rest of this atlas.

Footnotes

1. Business Insider, “See where data centers are across the US on our interactive map,” September 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/data-center-locations-us-map-ai-boom-2025-9. Cited for the 48-facility Maricopa County inventory and the county’s rank as the second-largest data-center cluster in the United States behind Northern Virginia’s 329 facilities. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Data Center Dynamics, “Tract announces 1.8 GW data center park in Phoenix, Arizona,” 2024, https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tract-announces-18gw-data-center-park-in-phoenix-arizona/. Cited for the 2,069-acre campus size, 1.8-gigawatt announced capacity, 2,000 acre-foot annual water cap, and planned 500-kilovolt transmission upgrade. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Data Center Dynamics, “Microsoft swapping water for air cooling at campus in Phoenix, Arizona,” 2024, https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-swapping-water-for-air-cooling-at-campus-in-phoenix-arizona/. Cited for Microsoft’s 279-acre Goodyear campus, 153,000 gallons per day water draw through buildings 1 through 3, and air-cooling retrofit for buildings 4 and 5. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Grist, “Arizona water, data centers, and semiconductors,” 2023, https://grist.org/technology/arizona-water-data-centers-semiconducters/. Cited for the June 2023 ADWR moratorium blocking approximately 40,000 planned residential units and the industrial exemption allowing data-center allocations to continue. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Circle of Blue, “Data centers a small but growing factor in Arizona’s water budget,” 2025, https://www.circleofblue.org/2025/supply/data-centers-a-small-but-growing-factor-in-arizonas-water-budget/. Cited for the Hassayampa sub-basin industrial drawdown dynamics, the Gila River Indian Community’s 653,500-acre-foot senior allocation under the 2004 settlement, and the community’s downstream monitoring posture. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. KJZZ, “Groundwater issues have halted developments in Buckeye, Arizona has plan to move forward,” October 2025, https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2025-10-15/groundwater-issues-have-halted-developments-in-buckeye-arizona-has-plan-to-move-forward. Cited for the Buckeye-specific moratorium effects and the municipal population figure of approximately 105,000 in 2023. ↩ ↩²

7. Western Resource Advocates, “Data Center Impacts in the Mountain West,” 2025, https://westernresourceadvocates.org/data-center-impacts/. Cited for the multi-state data-center water accounting placing Maricopa County in the top tier of water-risk jurisdictions, the asymmetric moratorium analysis, and the requests for cumulative ACC impact proceedings. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. EPCOR, “EPCOR Earns Historic ADAWS Designation,” November 2025, https://www.epcor.com/us/en/news/stories/2025-11-06-epcor-earns-historic-designation.html. Cited for the October 2025 first Alternative Designation of Assured Water Supply and the residential-freeze endpoint for approximately 37,000 blocked units. ↩

9. KJZZ, “Fight between homebuilders, Arizona water department could upend groundwater protection framework,” February 2026, https://www.kjzz.org/politics/2026-02-20/fight-between-homebuilders-arizona-water-department-could-upend-groundwater-protection-framework. Cited for the legal challenge to the ADWR Assured Water Supply rules and the potential moratorium framework outcomes. ↩

10. Arizona Capitol Times, “Who pays for Arizona’s AI power boom?,” March 2026, https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2026/03/10/who-pays-for-arizonas-ai-power-boom/. Cited for the 11.2 percent APS residential bill increase between 2023 and 2025, the 500-kilovolt transmission right-of-way filing, and the RUCO challenge to cross-class cost recovery. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

11. KTAR News, “Data centers, APS rate hike,” 2025, https://ktar.com/arizona-business/data-centers-aps-rate-hike/5812611/. Cited for APS’s proposed large-load rate structure and the residential surcharge mechanism for recovering data-center transmission costs. ↩ ↩²

12. Poder in Action, organizational record, https://www.azpoder.org/. Cited for the ACC rate-case intervention methodology, RUCO cost-of-service analysis requests, and Poder in Action’s community-translation role in utility proceedings. ↩ ↩² ↩³

13. Poder Latinx press release, cited in KJZZ and Western Resource Advocates coverage, April 2025. Cited for Chispa Arizona’s participation in rural-Arizona press actions on data-center energy-policy consequences. ↩

14. Arizona Mirror, “Home builders sue over assured water supply rules that hampered home building in west valley,” January 2025, https://azmirror.com/2025/01/24/home-builders-sue-over-assured-water-supply-rules-that-hampered-home-building-in-west-valley/. Cited for the January 2025 homebuilder litigation challenging ADWR groundwater rules. ↩