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It has recently been revealed that project blue will be built just outside of Tucson, and that it will be cooled entirely using water directly taken from the aquifer¹. This is because doing so will be profitable and make lots of money. Given the falling rate of profit, speculation into such projects has become increasingly necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. It is also important to note that such data centers exist not only to host the leftist boogey-man of “AI” but all internet infrastructure, including that on which the impressionable young proles of the PSL reach the liberation store to consume their own brand of commodities. As long as capital reigns, all this demand must be met somehow.

Originally, the center was planned to be built within the city limits of Tucson. In response to this, leftist activists mobilized to oppose construction, successfully lobbying the Tucson city council to ban the construction of the data center in Tucson, a major win for the public image of the Democrats as defenders of the local TuKKKsonian. Yet, the center is still being constructed, right outside the city’s jurisdiction, and therefore without any of the (admittedly worthless) environmental protections and municipal benefits that construction within the city would have provided.

The resources for this data center now come directly from the aquifer rather than the middle-man of Tucson water, since the city’s rights to these water resources is being enforced with the full extent of the law, something which represents a complete victory for the no desert data center coalition.²

Outside of any real governmental control, the construction down south is now being protested through symbolic demonstrations (also known as Live Action Roleplay or LARP), acts which are happening because the movement has lost, something which is itself a result of a flawed outlook from the start.

These activists can go no further than a shallow defense from immediate threats to our state’s resources. This is because they still operate with an ideology that ultimately stems from capitalism.

Those who are engaging in the Project Blue half-measure movement do so because they fail to recognize a major component of the world today: Governments in capitalist society (whether federal, state, local, even international) are not neutral territories where we can fight it out with our overlords. They are institutions which are inherently a major component of the capitalist system. They exist only for the efficient operation of capital by making sure each individual capitalist plays fair with the others, and occasionally to placate the working class to keep them servile. There is no “rallying” of the working class or “education” of them on the training wheels of such activism because the only lessons that can be learned are that reform works (when it is incidentally so) or that their effort is meaningless.

In the game of activism, if surrendering to this or that progressive demand ultimately poses little threat to the bourgeois, then they have every incentive to play ball. After all, it sure makes us proles feel good when it happens, as if we’ve won something for once. In this way we are made to feel as if we have real power, and so don’t need to organize beyond the electoral spectacle.

On the other hand, when an action is genuinely necessary for the accumulation of more capital, regardless of official rules, regulations are always able to be sidestepped, as is happening right in front of us. Yet our bourgeois system of democracy is so ingrained that after all is said and done the activists can comfort each other and say “Well sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, we just have to keep trying. There’s nothing else to do anyways!”. So we move deeper and deeper into the catastrophic environmental and economic crisis, one pat on the back at a time.

Our prediction from August of last year was that regardless of the city council’s ban, the data center would be built, which is now coming to pass. This analysis did not come from us being either prophets or geniuses, but rather because our framework is derived from the material analysis of the history of the Proletarian movement. The lessons that come out of the successes and failures of the past have long made it clear that reformism of all kinds is not only useless but an actively harmful strategy. That lesson has been laid bare once again, with this situation now serving only as yet another parable for revolutionaries of the future to learn from. We cannot fight our way out of capitalism through its reform in the same way that we cannot stop the environmental crisis by buying shirts from the liberation store.

Socialism Through Barbarism, Communism or Extinction – There is no Third Way!

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1. https://www.kvoa.com/news/local/wells-approved-for-houghton-road-data-center-site/article_bb50cd98-0ecf-4be5-9212-ccf10e7ee825.html ↩︎
2. https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/050526_project_blue_water/city-says-project-blue-must-stop-using-tucson-water-data-center-construction/ ↩︎

Sources for Graphic

Beef production & water intensity

Klopatek, J. M., & Oltjen, J. W. (2022). Water use and its impact on beef sustainability in the United States. Journal of Animal Science, 100(2), skab369. https://doi.org/10.1093/jas/skab369 (Peer-reviewed source for 275 gal/lb blue-water intensity.)

United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. (2024). Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook (November 2024). https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=107736 (Government source for annual and daily U.S. beef production volume.)

Data-center and AI water use

Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). (2023). Data centers and water consumption. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption (Government-linked nonprofit summary; ~400–449 million gal/day U.S. data-center water.)

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (2023). Data Center Water Efficiency. https://datacenters.lbl.gov/water-efficiency (Research-lab estimate confirming similar magnitudes.)

Mytton, D. (2021). Data centre water consumption. npj Clean Water, 4(10), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41545-021-00113-9 (Peer-reviewed study giving 0–2.18 L/kWh water intensity range.)

Li, S., Deng, C., Jin, Y., & Chen, Y. (2024). Making AI less “thirsty”: Uncovering and addressing the secret water footprint of AI models. Communications of the ACM (preprint). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.03271 (Peer-reviewed methods paper for ChatGPT per-prompt water: 0.01–0.05 L.)

Supplementary energy and infrastructure context

U.S. Department of Energy. (2023). Data centers and increasing electricity demand. https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers (Government report linking energy to water implications.)