California's biggest planned AI data center promised never to take Colorado River water. It's suing for it anyway.

A 330-megawatt AI data center — roughly the continuous power draw of a mid-size American city — planned for Imperial Valley once promised, in writing, never to draw from the Colorado River. Two cities and the farmer-run Imperial Irrigation District (IID) have now refused to give it any other water. The developer's response is the part most wire coverage keeps missing: it isn't negotiating. In mid-June, Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM) filed suit in California state court asking a judge to redirect roughly 287 million gallons of Colorado River water a year to the project, overriding the local refusals that produced the suit.

The numbers get attention. The mechanism is what will outlast them. The 287 million gallons a year IVCM is asking for works out to about 750,000 gallons a day, or roughly 880 acre-feet, against the IID's roughly 3.1 million acre-feet annual Colorado River entitlement — the share of river water the district is allocated under the long-standing western compact. That is the 0.028% share that put the case on the national wire, and it is also why a reader could be forgiven for treating the suit as a footnote. The fraction is small. The precedent it asks a court to set is not.

The project lead, Sebastian Rucci, is a Huntington Beach attorney. He has framed the requested draw as comparable to what a 160-acre farm in the Imperial Valley would use, a comparison that puts the volume in terms the basin understands. CalMatters reports that 95% to 97% of the water IID delivers already goes to agriculture, and that the IID's full Colorado River entitlement feeds farms that, taken together, make Imperial Valley one of the most productive agricultural counties in the country. Adding a 330-megawatt AI workload to that ledger, even at 0.028%, is a reallocation question, and the lawsuit is the procedural form that question has taken.

The reversal is what most national coverage has flattened. The project was originally approved on a commitment to use reclaimed wastewater rather than Colorado River water. Two Imperial Valley cities, El Centro and Imperial, have since declined to provide that reclaimed supply. The IID has declined the Colorado River request. The complaint filed in June asks the court to treat those three refusals as a single obstacle and rule past them. That is a different theory than a developer simply asking for water. It is a developer asking a court to override the unanimous answer it got when it asked the institutions that actually hold it.

The basin stakes are concrete. The Colorado River is the sole freshwater source for roughly 180,000 Imperial Valley residents and serves about 40 million people across seven western states under a 100-year-old compact now operating under chronic shortage. A single 330-megawatt facility is not what breaks that system on its own. What the lawsuit tests is whether a developer who has been told no, repeatedly and by every local institution with authority, can convert that no into a yes through litigation. The complaint is roughly six weeks old as of late July 2026. No IID public response to the suit has been captured in the reporting so far, and the IID's public data center facts page still frames the project as a future wastewater customer rather than a river-water litigant. The IID's silence is itself a fact. The next filing in the case is the next thing to watch.