A UK developer wants to put a $10 billion, 500-acre data center on city land next to Page and visible from Horseshoe Bend, turning a recreation buffer into heavy infrastructure.
For AI workloads, that likely means a large GPU campus with substantial continuous power draw and cooling demand in a fragile desert ecosystem.
Locals are focused on water: even medium data centers can consume 100+ million gallons a year, and Lake Powell is only ~26 percent full, so evaporative cooling looks politically toxic here.
The city is selling the project as jobs and diversification beyond tourism, but residents fear it will undercut the views that drive visitor revenue while exporting most of the economic upside to an overseas operator.
Governance is shaky: a citizen referendum with hundreds of signatures was tossed on a technicality, deepening distrust around how mega projects get approved and how community consent is handled.
The city claims it can back out or repurchase the land if conditions aren’t met, but water rights sit outside that, meaning a legally compliant data center could still drain local resources.
For anyone tracking AI data center siting, this is a clean example of how water, tourism, and democratic process can become gating factors as GPU-scale builds move into stressed regions, making the full article worth a read.
Source: Page residents push back on $10B data center proposal near Horseshoe Bend
