Are more data centers coming to a city near you? That depends on the city.
“For every city that maybe is rethinking their approach to data centers, I also have cities and towns that are also clamoring for data centers,” says René Guillen, Executive Director of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns.
Some Arizona cities and towns are clamoring for data centers; others have approved new ordinances restricting where they can locate. And there have been some high-profile cases — think Tucson and Chandler — in which communities have recently said, "no thanks" to new data center development altogether.
Cheers erupted at a Chandler City Council meeting in late 2025, after the council voted unanimously to reject a new data center in the southern part of the city. Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema had lobbied for it on behalf of the industry, and the vote to deny it was celebrated by folks like Bernie Sanders.
Chandler has six data center campuses, housing 11 data center buildings. On a sunny afternoon earlier this year, Micah Miranda, the city’s economic development director, gets in the car and heads over to what would have been the newest.
“This site was formerly occupied by Northrup Grumman. We retained them here in the community — they built a new manufacturing facility just up the road in the Price Corridor, and this was the site of the most recent zoning case,” he said.
The building has been vacant for almost a decade and sits on about ten acres. Miranda says he’d like to see it become something in line with what the city’s voters have said they want — developments like advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and R&D.
According to Miranda, data centers aren’t good or bad — it’s relative to where they are, especially what’s located around them. And that, he says, is part of Chandler’s challenge: The city is pretty well built out. That means when land opens up, Chandler has to be choosy about what to put there, and what it gets out of that development.
“We’re still a growing community,” Miranda said . “People continue to move to Chandler. We want to make sure we have a healthy jobs-to-housing ratio. So, we just don’t want to be a bedroom community, we want to make sure we’re gonna have employment opportunities for residents and regional residents for years into the future.”
But isn’t that one of the concerns about data centers, that they’re very large, but they do not create a whole lot of jobs?
“That’s one of the main challenges that a lot of more developed cities see,” Miranda said
And, he adds, it’s not just the jobs a data center can create. It’s about the fact that other companies don’t necessarily want or need to be near a data center.
“I’ve never had a company tell me, 'Hey, because we’re in this proximity to a data center, we’re gonna come.'"
Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke has served in city government for more than 15 years, and was one of the ‘no’ votes on that most recent data center project.
“We don’t need them as part of our economy,” Hartke said, “but if we believe that they can jump-start other industries or other possibilities of companies and jobs, we would be interested in looking at that.”
The jobs issue is a big one for cities. But it’s relative: A small number of jobs for one city might be considered a windfall in another. Yet, even data center operators acknowledge the facilities don’t need a lot of workers.
Jason Pfaff with Iron Mountain says his data centers typically employ two people per shift, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
“You have critical infrastructure technicians … those are your electrical and mechanical specialists,” Pfaff said. “You have service delivery, which would be kind of that service focus, whatever our customers need, because we do provide service for them for a fee — we’ll go reboot a server or we’ll go change out something. And then we have security, as well.”
But even though data centers don’t create a lot of jobs, some Valley cities are still looking to bring them in.
Across the Valley from Chandler, Buckeye is trying to attract data centers to a specific part of town. Mayor Eric Orsborn explains.
“There are places where I 100% agree that does not make sense to put a data center in that specific property, with that set of circumstances in that community,” Orsborn said.
“But,” he added, “we really think that when we make our case and help the public to understand the benefits and how we’re dealing with some of the issues that come with data centers that this is the right location for data center development to happen.”’
Orsborn understands why some cities might be feeling all done with data centers. But in Buckeye’s case, he says, there’s plenty of land for both data centers and other developments.
“We have so much property and we have areas that these specific uses fit and they are away from the residential, and you know, we still have just miles and miles of property that still work for the logistics and the advanced manufacturing,” Orsborn said.
That’s more than 639 square miles — making Buckeye Arizona’s biggest city by land area and one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Buckeye still has areas where you can get that rural feel and find a tractor dealership, but it also has one of the best-known high-end master-planned communities, Verrado.
The land Orsborn envisions for data centers is south of Interstate 10, just west of the city’s airport. Right now, it’s mostly open desert and farmland — and, Orsborn said, importantly, it’s away from homes. A data center land acquisition and development company called Tract bought the more than two-thousand acres in 2024.In a press release from the time, Tract predicted the parcel would become one of the biggest data center spaces in the country with as much as 20 million square feet in as many as 40 individual centers.
The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment, so it’s hard to say how that development is going. But Orsborn says it makes sense to put data centers in that part of town.
“I think every location that I’ve heard contemplated, and specifically the one that’s out west of our airport, is away from any large master-planned community and is actually in a really good location, it is a very complimentary use to our airport,” he said.
Orsborn doesn’t mind that other cities are turning down data centers.
“Well, I tell all of them, hey when you’re telling them you don’t want ‘em, tell ‘em to come to Buckeye,” he said. “We’d really appreciate that.”
While Orsborn — and the leaders of other cities looking to attract data centers — believe there is an economic value to having them there, residents often don’t see it that way. Projects have faced opposition in cities and towns across the state and country due to concerns about power and water use, noise and other criticism.
Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke says he’s surprised how big of an issue data centers have become to the general public.
“I think a lot of it is the big building, it’s the uncertain future, it is even the imagined future. For some, what could this lead to? And so, there’s a lot of story out there,” he said.
So that means mayors looking to add data centers, like Buckeye’s Eric Orsborn, have to tell that story and address their residents’ concerns.
“Some of it is just going through the process of answering the questions and making sure people understand the realities of this, and then also the benefits of it, too — the build-out of the infrastructure, the revenues, the jobs that come with it,” Orsborn said. “All that, it’s very important to get out to the public so that we’re all understanding the same facts that come along with development like this.”
But that can still be tough. And Chandler’s Micah Miranda says it’s an industry-wide challenge that’s not going away.
“That’s a challenge I think that the data center industry is gonna have to overcome, is how do you make this technology, this very important part of 21st century, digestible and then acceptable,” he said.
And Buckeye’s Orsborn says that’s not just a Valley thing, or unique to Arizona. He was at a gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors earlier this year where this very issue came up.
“It was funny to listen,” he recalled. “We were in a room full of mayors all sitting around and all of us have microphones and they go around the room and are taking questions or comments, and every single mayor in that room starts by saying, 'Hi, I’m so-and-so, I’m from Ohio, and we’re on the front lines of data center development.'
“And then you have somebody from Arkansas saying, ‘Well, I’m out at this location in Arkansas and we’re on the front lines of data center development.’ And it was funny to hear from everybody in the room about everybody being on the front lines."
What those front lines will look like in the future is an open question.
Despite the Chandler City Council voting down that new project, both the city’s mayor and economic development director say they’re not against data centers and are open to potentially developing new ones down the road. Meanwhile, cities like Buckeye and others are looking to bring in new projects of their own, as demand for data only continues to rise.
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