Casa Grande held its first public hearing on a data center, but it did not go as residents had hoped. Now, a data center, battery and natural gas facility — roughly the same size as New York City’s Central Park — will be allowed to take shape 8 miles from the city’s downtown. … The city has limited the Grande Valley Data Center complex to 300 acre-feet of water — or 97 million gallons of water use per year. That includes water for cooling servers in the facilities and for generating natural gas power on-site. We don’t know how much energy the site will use, if it will connect to the state’s grid, or when. Speakers were particularly disturbed by the project’s intended water use amid major Colorado River cuts that have impacted farmers in the community and across Central Arizona.

Other data center water use news:

• The Colorado Sun (Denver): Colorado data center fight heads to Brighton next as opposition grows
• AP News: Amazon to invest $1B into data center communities amid backlash against data center rollouts
• The Land Desk: Blog: Massive nuclear plant/waste dump/data center complex planned for BLM land in Utah