The concept of vertical integration — controlling multiple stages of a production or supply chain within a single geographic and institutional framework — creates efficiencies and competitive advantages that distributed operations cannot replicate. What Imperial Valley has, if it allows the IVDC to proceed alongside the Lithium Valley development underway, is the beginnings of a vertically integrated clean energy and technology campus that does not exist at scale anywhere else in the United States.
Let’s trace what that looks like in practice.
Stage One: Geothermal Generation
The geothermal plants already operating in the Salton Sea region produce continuous, carbon-free electricity from the volcanic heat beneath the Valley floor. This generation is baseload — it runs at full capacity around the clock regardless of weather, season, or time of day. It does not require storage to be useful because it is always available. For an AI data center that needs to run multi-day training jobs without interruption, geothermal baseload is the ideal power source.
Stage Two: Lithium Extraction
The same geothermal brine that drives the power plants contains dissolved lithium in concentrations that make commercial extraction viable. CTR and its competitors are developing the direct lithium extraction technology that would pull lithium from the brine stream during the geothermal power generation process — producing both power and battery-grade lithium from the same resource, at the same facility, with minimal additional environmental footprint.
The lithium goes into batteries. Some of those batteries could go into the 862 MWh BESS at the IVDC. The BESS stores geothermal power during off-peak periods and discharges during peak demand — integrating the storage function with the generation and the compute functions within a coherent geographic and logistical network.
Stage Three: AI Compute
The IVDC is the anchor tenant for the compute function. It consumes the geothermal power directly. It benefits from the grid stability that the BESS provides. It creates the industrial demand base that makes additional geothermal investment economically viable — because a large, stable, long-term power customer makes the financial model for new geothermal development more attractive to investors.
In a mature version of this ecosystem, the data center’s power is locally generated, locally stored, and locally managed. The transmission losses that plague long-distance power delivery are eliminated. The grid instability that makes renewable power problematic for industrial users is addressed by on-site storage. The carbon footprint of AI compute — a growing concern for both technology companies and their customers — approaches zero.
What This Requires to Become Real
The vertically integrated energy-AI campus is not science fiction. Every component of it either exists already (geothermal plants, BESS technology, data center design) or is in active development (direct lithium extraction). The geography is correct. The resource base is real. The technology is proven.
What it requires is an institutional environment that allows large capital projects to proceed through their approved development timelines without being derailed by coordinated legal obstruction. The IVDC is the first major test of whether Imperial Valley can provide that environment. If it can, the ecosystem has a starting point. If it can’t, the components will find their way to other geographies where the institutional environment is more conducive to completion.
The opportunity is genuinely rare. The community’s ability to seize it depends on getting the IVDC right.