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The Vertically Integrated Energy-AI Campus: Imperial Valley’s Unique Opportunity

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.

Lithium Valley Meets Silicon Valley: The Integrated Tech Ecosystem Imperial Valley Can Build

The phrase “Lithium Valley” has entered the mainstream conversation about Imperial Valley’s economic future. It refers to the enormous geothermal lithium resource beneath the Salton Sea — lithium that could supply a significant fraction of the United States’ battery manufacturing demand if the extraction projects now in development can be completed. The economic, environmental, and geopolitical implications of a domestic lithium supply chain anchored in California have attracted attention from Washington, Sacramento, and the global clean energy investment community.

The phrase “Silicon Valley” needs no introduction. It is the global center of gravity for technology investment, entrepreneurship, and the companies that have defined the digital economy. Its influence is geographic and institutional — a concentration of capital, talent, and infrastructure that has shaped the global technology industry for half a century.

What Imperial Valley has — and what no other region in America currently has at comparable scale — is the natural resource foundation to combine the energy economy of Lithium Valley with the computational infrastructure of Silicon Valley, on an independent grid, in a single coherent geography. This is not a marketing tagline. It is a technical observation about a specific combination of assets that happens to exist in this one place.

The Components

Geothermal generation: already operating, baseload, carbon-free, scalable with additional development. The Salton Sea region has estimated geothermal capacity well beyond what is currently developed. The resource is not going anywhere.

Lithium extraction: in active development by CTR and competitors. Direct lithium extraction from geothermal brine produces battery-grade lithium as a co-product of power generation. If the projects are completed, Imperial Valley becomes a domestic supply anchor for an input that the entire global clean energy transition depends on.

Battery storage: the BESS technology that the IVDC includes is manufactured from lithium. A region that produces lithium domestically, at scale, has obvious economic interest in also being a destination for battery manufacturing and battery storage deployment. The supply chain logic is compelling.

AI compute: the IVDC is the anchor of the compute function. It requires power continuously, at scale, from a reliable source. Geothermal power is that source. IID’s independent grid is the delivery mechanism. The 75-acre I-2 site is the location.

The Flywheel

These components reinforce each other in ways that create economic momentum. A large industrial power customer (the data center) makes additional geothermal investment more financially viable by providing demand certainty. More geothermal development produces more lithium as a byproduct. More domestic lithium supply reduces battery costs. Lower battery costs make large-scale BESS deployments more attractive. More BESS deployments improve grid stability, making more data center development viable. More data center development attracts technology company interest in the region. Technology company presence attracts talent and supporting industries. The flywheel spins.

This is not speculation about a distant future. It is a description of the economic logic that connects assets that already exist in Imperial Valley in various stages of development. What it requires to become a functioning flywheel rather than a collection of unrealized potential is the completion of the first major component — the data center — that creates the demand base that makes everything else more financially viable.

The Stakes

Imperial Valley has been hearing about its potential for a long time. Geothermal energy potential. Lithium Valley potential. Solar development potential. Data center potential. The gap between recognized potential and realized economic development is the most important economic policy question the region faces — and it is a question about institutional capacity, not about natural resources or technical feasibility.

The resources are real. The technology is proven. The capital is available. The project is approved. The court has ruled. What Imperial Valley needs now is for its institutions to honor those approvals and let the community capture the economic future that its natural endowments make possible.

Lithium Valley and Silicon Valley meet in Imperial Valley. The question is whether the Valley will let them.

Lithium Valley, the Data Center, and the Economic Future Imperial Valley Keeps Almost Capturing

The economic potential of Imperial Valley has been recognized and discussed for years. The geothermal resources. The lithium in the Salton Sea brine. The solar irradiance. The land. The independent grid. Academic papers have been written, government reports commissioned, investment conferences held. The Valley is consistently described as one of the most significant untapped economic development opportunities in the American West.

And yet the transformation keeps not quite arriving. CTR is fighting through CEQA challenges. The IVDC is fighting through litigation. Other projects in the pipeline face similar obstacles. The gap between the Valley’s recognized potential and its realized economic development is large and persistent.

That gap has a cause. It is not geological, it is not infrastructural, and it is not financial. It is political and institutional. The same patterns that are documented in the IVDC fight — organized CEQA obstruction, coordinated opposition by officials and organizations with competing interests, manufactured legal exposure — appear across multiple projects in the region. The Valley keeps almost capturing its economic future because certain actors benefit from the capture never completing.

What a Realized Lithium Valley Requires

Lithium Valley — the geothermal lithium extraction opportunity in the Salton Sea region — is a national strategic priority. Domestic lithium supply for electric vehicle batteries and grid storage is a critical minerals challenge that affects the United States’ ability to transition its energy system and reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains. Imperial Valley is the most significant domestic opportunity for addressing that challenge.

Realizing that opportunity requires multiple large projects getting built in a reasonable timeframe. CTR and its competitors have invested years and significant capital in development. They have navigated federal, state, and local approval processes. They are capable of building these projects. What they need is an institutional environment that allows permitted projects to proceed — without the greenmail demands, the coordinated CEQA campaigns, and the jurisdictional overreach that have characterized the Imperial Valley development environment.

The IVDC fight is connected to the Lithium Valley fight because the same institutional environment affects both. A region that demonstrates — through the IVDC outcome — that permitted projects can be completed despite organized obstruction sends a different signal to every Lithium Valley developer than a region that demonstrates the opposite.

The Data Center as Infrastructure for Everything Else

The IVDC is not just a data center. It is demand-side infrastructure for the energy economy that the Valley is trying to build. A 330-megawatt industrial customer for IID creates the load that justifies additional generation investment. Additional generation investment makes more geothermal projects financially viable. More geothermal projects bring more lithium extraction. Lithium extraction brings battery manufacturing interest. Battery manufacturing brings the entire value chain of the clean energy transition to a region that has the resources to anchor it.

None of this happens if the first major step — a hyperscale data center on industrial land with access to geothermal power — gets blocked by organized obstruction after clearing every legal hurdle. The IVDC is the anchor tenant of an economic ecosystem that doesn’t exist yet but could. The fight over whether it gets built is a fight over whether that ecosystem ever starts to form.

Imperial Valley has been on the verge of transformation for too long. The people who live there are entitled to see that transformation actually happen, and to hold accountable the actors who have made it their business to prevent it.