The 950,000-Square-Foot Question: What a Hyperscale Data Center Actually Looks Like
Discussions about the Imperial Valley Data Center often involve statistics without context. 950,000 square feet. 330 megawatts. 862 megawatt-hours. 75 acres. These are large numbers, and they are cited by both supporters and opponents in ways that often leave the listener without a frame of reference for what they actually mean in practice.
Here is that context, starting with the building itself.
The Physical Scale
950,000 square feet is roughly the floor area of six large Costco warehouses placed end-to-end. It is a large industrial building — the kind of structure that is unremarkable in the context of I-2 Heavy Industrial zoning, which is designed to accommodate exactly this kind of large-footprint industrial use. The site is 75 acres, which provides substantial setback and operational area around the primary structure.
The building is, fundamentally, an industrial facility. It houses rows of computer servers in temperature-controlled halls, along with the cooling, power distribution, and support infrastructure those servers require. From the outside, a hyperscale data center looks like a very large warehouse with more visible mechanical equipment on the roof. It does not look like a power plant, a chemical facility, or a manufacturing operation. It generates no smoke, no chemical waste, no industrial byproducts beyond heat — which the cooling system manages.
The Power Infrastructure
330 megawatts is a large power load. For context: a typical residential household in California uses approximately 6-7 kilowatts of peak demand. 330 megawatts is the equivalent of roughly 47,000 homes. That number sounds alarming out of context. In context, it is a large industrial customer on an IID grid that has existing industrial loads and the generation capacity to serve them.
The key distinction is that the IVDC includes a dedicated 330-megawatt substation — infrastructure the developer builds and pays for — that connects directly to IID’s transmission network without burdening the existing distribution infrastructure that residential customers use. The data center is not drawing power through the same lines that serve homes in El Centro. It is a direct industrial connection at the transmission level.
The 862 MWh BESS is the other crucial context. This battery system means the facility does not draw 330 megawatts continuously from the grid. It draws power during off-peak hours to charge the batteries, then runs on battery storage during peak demand. The actual grid impact profile is a large but manageable off-peak load, not a continuous 330-megawatt demand spike.
The Water System
The cooling system for a facility of this size requires substantial water volumes. In a conventional water-cooled data center, this would mean significant potable water consumption — the 750,000-gallon figure that the opposition cites. The IVDC’s design avoids this entirely by using recycled municipal wastewater in a closed-loop system. The water is not drawn from the Colorado River or from potable supplies. It is treated effluent that municipal plants currently manage as a disposal challenge.
Physically, this means purple-pipe infrastructure running from municipal treatment facilities to the data center site — the same kind of reclaimed water distribution infrastructure that irrigation systems and industrial parks across California already use. The water goes into the cooling system, cycles through the facility, and the excess returns to the treatment cycle rather than being consumed or discharged as waste.
What the Facility Is Not
The IVDC is not a power generation facility. It does not produce electricity; it consumes it. It is not a chemical processing facility. It handles no hazardous materials beyond the standard industrial chemicals used in cooling systems. It is not an extraction operation. It does not mine, drill, or excavate. It is not a manufacturing plant. It produces no physical product.
It is a large industrial building that houses computer servers and the infrastructure to power and cool them. In the context of I-2 Heavy Industrial zoning — designed for exactly this class of industrial use — the IVDC is the intended occupant of the land it sits on. The scale of the numbers involved is real, but the nature of the use is precisely what the zoning framework was designed to accommodate.
