Amazon Web Services is company behind Tucson’s Project Blue, according to 2023 county memo

Originally published on AZ Luminaria on July 21, 2025.

Exclusive: Records obtained by Arizona Luminaria tie the tech giant to a massive data center that has been shrouded in secrecy until now.

The mysterious company behind the massive Project Blue data center proposed for Tucson is named as Amazon Web Services in a 2023 document about the development obtained through a public records request by Arizona Luminaria. 

The one-page county document — titled “Project Profile: Project Blue” — says “Project Blue is Amazon Web Services (AWS),” under the heading “Company Details.”

The 290-acre data center campus — nearly the size of downtown Tucson — proposed for an area north of Pima County Fairgrounds and west of Houghton Road is one of the largest development projects ever considered by the city or county. 

Proponents have cited new jobs and an economic boost as support for the project. Local critics have warned that the project would be a drain on Tucson’s water, energy and environment. They’ve also raised concerns over public officials’ silence on the company behind the project.

County officials have said they are under non-disclosure agreements that kept them from naming the company. Mayor Regina Romero and other city officials who responded Monday to Arizona Luminaria’s questions about the public record naming Amazon Web Services as the company behind the data center said they did not know what company was involved in the project. 

Amazon Web Services did not respond to a request for comment from Arizona Luminaria. 

The next steps for the project include two public forums in July and a city council meeting in August.

Amazon Web Services is the part of Amazon that runs the internet for a lot of the world. It stores data and hosts websites for everything from blogs to major platforms like Netflix and government agencies.

Reports on the realities of data centers from localities across the nation show a gap between promises made by companies in their initial stages, and the actual impacts on local residents and water and energy use.

A Grist investigation of water use at Amazon data centers found that pledges to conserve water didn’t account for water use and evaporative cooling practices at power plants needed to keep the data centers running. 

Locally, Phoenix and Mesa each have a number of data centers that have raised questions about future energy usage at the state level. Arizona’s largest utility, APS, reported that energy demand is rising 100 times faster for data centers than for all other types of power customers. Utility experts have raised concerns that local customers could shoulder those costs. 

Phoenix implemented new zoning this summer to require health and safety permits for data centers building in the region, as well as earlier discussions with city staff.

“Phoenix is not banning data centers; we’re planning for them responsibly,” said the city’s planning director in a press release. 

Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen, of District 3, is a proponent of studying how best to strengthen regulation of data centers.

Responding to public concern over the secretive nature of the county and company’s negotiations, Allen told Arizona Luminaria on Monday. “People need to know, need to understand when and where and why. It’s their water, it’s their community.”

Deciding in the dark  

On July 7, Arizona Luminaria requested emails and internal county memos that include the words “Project Blue,” “Data Center,” or other terms related to energy use for the proposed project. The data center has been under discussion by local officials since at least 2023, according to emails between county administrators and real estate investment firm, Diamond Ventures. 

The county has been under a non-disclosure agreement since at least June 2024, according to a Feb 20, 2025 memo from County Administrator Jan Lesher. The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to approve the rezoning and sale of county-owned land at a public meeting in June. Supervisors Steve Christy, Rex Scott and Matt Heinz voted in favor of the sale; Supervisors Andrés Cano and Jen Allen voted against. 

During the meeting, board members heard a presentation promising 180 new jobs, lower electricity costs for all Tucson-area customers (despite a proposed 14% rate hike by Tucson Electric Power separate from Project Blue) and that the project would eventually be powered entirely by renewable energy.

Arizona Luminaria reached out to Lesher, the county’s five supervisors, Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure, Mayor Romero and the six council members for comment on Amazon Web Services being named in the 2023 county document as the company behind the data center. 

Lesher told Arizona Luminaria Monday that the memo naming Amazon Web Services as Project Blue should have redacted details including the name of the company. 

Chair of the Board of Supervisors Rex Scott told Arizona Luminaria on Monday that he had "absolutely no second thoughts at all” about his vote to approve the land sale. He said he was “one hundred percent comfortable with the vote I took and would cast the same vote today.”

However he added that “the entire board, regardless of how we voted: all five of us wish we had more information.”

Allen called the project “mind-boggling.”

“It just feels like we’re bending over backwards and contorting ourselves to accommodate what may well be Amazon to bring 70-plus fulltime jobs and to consume 1.3 gigawatts of energy and nearly 2 million gallons of water a day, and it defies logic,” Allen told Arizona Luminaria.

County administration is working on reforming its non-disclosure agreement policies, she said. 

“It was way too secret for way too long,” Heinz, of District 2, said of Project Blue. He reiterated his support for the project, emphasizing that the cooling technology is rapidly progressing, and the data center may ultimately use much less water than projected. 

“Even though I think it’s a good thing for the community,” Heinz said the secrecy “makes us look like we don’t have our shit together.”

“I don’t accept that an elected official can be bound by an NDA I never signed and didn’t know about,” Heinz added.

The next step of the approval process goes to Tucson City Council in August, where officials will weigh annexation and rezoning of the proposed land. 

In the coming weeks, city officials will hold several public forums about the data center ahead of the planned Aug. 19 public hearing on the project. At that same meeting, the council could vote to proceed with the agreement. Final consideration from the council on annexing the site could happen in October, and consideration of the zoning procedure is tentatively set to take place in November.  

Tucson Mayor Romero told Arizona Luminaria Monday that she also did not know the company behind Project Blue. While she remains committed to jobs and economic development, Romero said, she also promises to protect Tucson’s air and water. 

“I want to be clear: I am committed to full transparency and an informed process. That means sharing information, and doing my homework,” Romero said in a statement. “I will continue to ask tough questions about water and energy use, environmental impacts, job creation, sustainability, and the actual benefits to our community. I am actively pressing the developers for answers, and will continue to do so.” 

Several council members have come out in strong opposition of the data center, regardless of the company involved. Council members Kevin Dahl and Paul Cunningham have both said they are a strong “no” vote on the project. 

“I don’t know anything more than anyone else knows, and because of that I don’t like the secrecy piece,” said Ward 2 council member Cunningham on Monday. “The way this deal is structured, it’s going to be hard to change my mind from a no.” 

Dahl said the public should have the name of the company behind Project Blue before any next steps are taken. “This end user should be known before Tucson decides whether to start the process of annexation,” he said in a Monday statement to Luminaria. 

Karin Uhlich, outgoing Ward 6 council member, said in a Monday statement to Arizona Luminaria that Tucson needed to weigh water stewardship not only within the bounds of its region, but in the context of the state’s water security. 

She and her council colleagues were studying “whether we can sufficiently mitigate concerns and meaningfully enforce protections and agreements.”

Ward 5’s council member Rocque Perez said as of July 21, he had not been provided with confirmation of the company behind Project Blue. “In the absence of confirmed information, it would be premature to comment on Amazon Web Services specifically,” Perez said. 

“That said, I believe Tucsonans deserve transparency — regardless of which company is ultimately involved, whether it is Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Meta. These companies have very different records when it comes to workers’ rights, privacy, and environmental impact.” 

The city has referenced a non-disclosure agreement related to the project, according to Tucson’s Project Blue explainer page.  

In the web page, posted online this July, City Manager Tom Thomure writes in the overview, “While NDAs are a standard practice for economic development projects to protect confidential business information from competitors, they have also constrained fact-sharing to date.”

Thomure said Monday he didn't have first-hand knowledge of the final company for the project, and said he hoped to acquire more information about the environmental protections for Tucson as the project moved ahead.

"I can’t answer questions about a theoretical operator that I don’t know," he said.

Local opposition has been broad and boisterous, with a particular focus on the environmental impact of the proposed data center. 

“Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to about this thinks it’s a terrible idea,” said Vivek Bharathan, an organizer with a broad campaign called No Desert Data Center. “The desert is no place for a water-guzzling, energy-draining, heat-generating monster.” 

Data center restrictions 

According to Data Center Map, an organization that tracks and researches data centers all over the world, Amazon Web Services has 210 data centers globally, with another 94 currently being planned or under construction. 

Amazon already has a local presence, with two fulfillment centers and a delivery warehouse in Pima County. The company has come under fire for creating low-paid jobs; a 2023 report from the National Employment Law Project shows workers in Amazon warehouses make hundreds of dollars less a month than their non-Amazon counterparts.

In Minnesota, state regulators have paused a planned Amazon data center project because of a dispute over how to classify Amazon’s need for backup generators, an example of the unexpected environmental needs of a data center project. 

And in Memphis, which is home to a data center powering Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, a regulatory loophole means none of the center’s 35 temporary methane gas turbines have pollution controls usually required by federal law. “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?” one resident who lives nearby, in an area that leads the state in asthma hospitalization, told Politico.

Tempe officials are also weighing new zoning regulations that would restrict data centers from being built near residential centers and rail corridors. 

Officials in Mesa want to pause new data centers in the area to encourage other industries that provide more jobs. Developers are considering 15 new data center projects in Mesa, The Mesa Tribune reported.

“Water availability, increased infrastructure when it comes to power, fiber optic cables … are all being eaten up by a single sector that doesn’t provide a lot of jobs,” one council member said. 

Corrections and clarifications: Rocque Perez is an appointed city council member. An earlier version called him interim.

This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.