Glendale Annexed 160 Acres for a $10 Billion Data Center and Its Own Gas Plant. An Air Force Base Wrote the Toughest Conditions in the Deal.

April Butler lives and works about a mile from a stretch of farmland near Litchfield Road and Olive Avenue, on Glendale, Arizona's western edge. On October 27th, she watched the city council vote 6-1 to annex that 160 acres and rezone it for Project Eagle, three data center buildings, and, right beside them, Project Baccara, an 18-turbine, 700-megawatt natural gas power plant built to run them. Her objection wasn't abstract. "We need to really pay attention to what we're using here in Arizona, and we have a limited supply," she told the council before the vote.

Glendale's own numbers explain why six of seven council members voted yes anyway. The city estimates the private investment at roughly $10.27 billion: $370 million for the data center buildings, $1.7 billion for the gas plant, and close to $8.2 billion more in equipment purchases and replacements over the project's life. City staff project about $150 million in revenue over the next decade. For a city still filling out its tax base west of downtown Phoenix, that's a real number attached to a real vote, not a developer's slide deck.

It wasn't a clean yes. Councilmember Lupe Conchas had voiced opposition earlier in the process and voted for the project anyway, saying the council would hold the developers to their promises on behalf of the residents living closest to the site. Councilmember Dianna Guzman cast her yes the same way, saying she would have opposed the project outright if she believed it would actually harm the community. Those aren't the words of people rubber-stamping a deal. They're the words of people betting that the conditions attached to the approval will hold up once turbines and servers are actually running.

Councilmember Margaret Little wasn't willing to make that bet. She cast the lone no vote, telling her colleagues plainly: "I don't believe that this is a good location for the project." Her objection centered on air quality and proximity to homes, not on the investment math. Nobody on the dais disputed that the money was real. The argument was over where it should land.

The toughest conditions came from an Air Force base, not city hall

The site sits inside the approach corridor for Luke Air Force Base, and Luke's own compatibility review turned out to carry more teeth than anything in Glendale's zoning code. The base told the city the project was acceptable only on conditions: the gas turbines' emissions have to be mitigated so they don't create a visibility or heat-plume hazard for pilots on approach, and the developers have to manage fire and explosion risk around a facility that will sit under an active military flight path. The city wrote those conditions directly into the annexation ordinance rather than leaving them as a side letter, which means Luke, not the planning department, ended up setting the hardest technical bar this project has to clear.

That's worth sitting with for a minute, because it's not the constraint most zoning reviews are built to catch. A typical data center siting review runs through interconnection capacity, water availability, noise limits, setbacks. A flight-path compatibility requirement from an active fighter base is a different animal entirely, closer to an FAA obstruction case than a utility interconnection study, and it's the kind of condition that shows up late in a project's life if nobody went looking for it early. Glendale got lucky that Luke's own review process caught it before concrete got poured. Plenty of sites elsewhere in the country have discovered a base or an approach corridor only after a permit was already in hand.

A closed-loop pledge isn't a water allocation

Water is where this project's paperwork is thinnest. The City of Glendale itself won't be supplying water or wastewater service to the site at all; that falls to EPCOR, a separate utility. Before the council vote, a planning commissioner asked a plain question that nobody had a clean answer for: why didn't the approval packet include a water availability study? The developers' attorney told the commission the water supply, or the water credits that would stand in for it, were still being finalized. The pitch in the meantime is a closed-loop cooling system that the company says will use roughly a quarter of the water the same land used when it was still farmland.

That's a real engineering claim, and it may well hold up. On GridPermit's own Kill Test, it's a claim sitting well below a signed allocation, not a permit, and the gap between the two is exactly where projects like this one tend to get into trouble two or three years after the ribbon-cutting, not on the day of the vote. Waddell resident Tony Camisi said the unanswered water questions were less about the number itself than about what it said about the process: if the basic availability study wasn't in the packet yet, what else wasn't. Arizona's seen this exact gap before. Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing told regulators and reporters for months that its California data center complex would run on recycled wastewater instead of the Colorado River, then sued its local irrigation district for 260 million gallons of river water a year the moment the recycled supply didn't materialize.

Opponents organized around that uncertainty rather than against the project in the abstract; local reporting put the signature count on a petition against Project Eagle at roughly 11,000. Not every neighbor signed it. Surprise resident Lisa Everett told reporters she supports the project and thinks it will strengthen the region's infrastructure, adding that being a data center doesn't mean a company gets to skip the rules everyone else follows. That's a fair test to hold Glendale's conditions to going forward: not whether the project got approved, but whether the water study that wasn't in the packet this month ever actually shows up, and whether Luke's emissions conditions get enforced as rigorously after construction starts as they were negotiated before the vote.

This vote also didn't happen in a vacuum. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes spent much of October holding town halls and publicly pushing the legislature and Governor Katie Hobbs to pause new data center approvals statewide, citing a Colorado River allocation cut of close to 30% and rising household power bills. Her office puts the current count at 110 active data centers in Arizona, another 10 under construction, and roughly 40 more in planning. Hobbs already signed a three-year pause on new data center tax incentives back in June. None of that changed Glendale's math on October 27th, and nothing in the record ties Mayes's statewide push directly to this specific vote. But it's the backdrop every council member voting that night understood they were voting against, and it's worth remembering the next time a city insists its own local approval process is operating independently of the statewide fight.

The cleanest way to read what Glendale actually approved is that it's two decisions wearing one name. Project Eagle, the data center, is the easy part: three buildings, a known use, a known tax benefit. Project Baccara, the merchant gas plant built specifically to feed it, is the part that will determine whether this deal looks, in five years, like sound infrastructure planning or like the city quietly approved a power plant under cover of an AI announcement. Wisconsin's Foundry Ridge and Red Oak Ridge gas plants raised the same question about whether the data center or the power plant next to it is actually the project on the table. Glendale wrote real, specific, enforceable conditions into the one piece of this deal, aviation safety, where an outside federal tenant had the leverage to insist on them. The piece where the city itself had the most leverage, water, is the piece still sitting on a developer's unfinished promise.