title: “‘We don’t need 50 more data centers’: Arizona AG declares war on AI” url: “https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/26/data-center-arizona-election-attorney-general-water-kris-mayes-01134827” author: “Zack Colman”
Polls suggest Mayes is leading her Republican opponent, Senate President Warren Petersen, ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Water consumption is front and center in Arizona’s debate over data centers. Mayes has also challenged utilities’ plans to raise electricity rates, saying tech companies should cover the costs of their power consumption. Then there’s the community impacts, with residents showing up to town halls in tears because data centers popped up seemingly overnight.
“I would call on the industry to have some common sense and some humanity, quite frankly,” Mayes said.
The pushback comes as states across the country struggle to balance adding new power supplies to meet surging demand — much of it driven by data centers and large manufacturing facilities — while limiting consumer costs.
Mayes, a former chair of the Arizona Corporation Commission, said utility regulators should err on the side of consumers. As attorney general, she opposed efforts by Tucson Electric Power and Arizona Public Service to raise electricity rates by up to 13% and 14%, respectively, to recover capital spending. Those expenses, she said, largely came from supplying data centers with power, adding that customers should not have to shoulder the costs of utilities that are “doing fine” financially.
“There should be not one single power plant transmission line, substation, or distribution line that is subsidized by consumers, and those should be paid for by the out-of-state billionaires that are bringing the data centers into Arizona,” she said.
But Mayes acknowledged the limits of her power to block data centers. She’s pursued nuisance lawsuits against projects that disrupt quality of life through noise pollution or operations that raise temperatures in already sweltering neighborhoods.
Blanket policies would be better, Mayes said. She has used her office to crack down on illegal groundwater pumping to prevent depleting aquifers, which can take decades to refill because of persistent drought. But those are one-off battles — just like her cases against data centers.
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“But data centers themselves, she said, often use similar amounts of water to other big users, like beverage bottlers and golf courses, which generally receive less public pushback.”