The data center a town can live with.
We are a Tucson company. We watched our own county fight over a data center for a year. This page is what that fight asked for, what a switch can honestly do about it, and what it cannot.
What Tucson taught.
Project Blue, a $3.6 billion campus near the fairgrounds, went from a unanimous rejection to a moratorium in thirteen months. The dates matter because they are the shape of every data center fight now.
- Aug 2025
Tucson City Council votes unanimously against Project Blue, citing water and power. AZ Luminaria
- Dec 2025
The Arizona Corporation Commission approves the power contract 4 to 1. Pima County approves the land sale 3 to 2: 290 acres, $20.8 million, closed-loop air cooling, a $15 million community fund, and "commercially reasonable efforts" toward renewable power. AZPM, KJZZ
- Jan 2026
Residents sue the county over open-meetings violations. Arizona Daily Star
- May 2026
The city revokes the developer's construction water meter and demands two acre-feet back. KJZZ
- Aug 2026
Tucson adopts its first data center ordinance: anything over 20 MW needs a noise-control plan and environmental reporting. The city's compiled public comments are the record of what residents asked for.
- Sep 2026
Pima County approves a 120-day moratorium on new data centers in unincorporated areas. CALÓ News
Three constraints, everywhere.
Power
In April 2026 Arizona's three utilities told the Corporation Commission the same thing: demand exceeds their ability to serve. APS reported 13.1 GW of large-customer peak demand, SRP 7 GW across 59 customers, TEP an 8 to 10 GW speculative queue, against about 2 GW of data centers operating statewide. Nationally, the PJM capacity price rose tenfold in two years and data centers were 63% of the increase; regulators in 23 states have approved large-load tariffs that make operators pay for capacity whether they use it or not. ACC, IEEFA, EEI
Water
Marana bars its potable supply from data center cooling. Coconino County bars drinking water for cooling unless no alternative exists. California now ties permits to water disclosure, and a federal bill would require annual water and energy reports from every facility over 25 MW. The evaporative cooling tower, which uses about 1.8 liters per IT kilowatt-hour, is becoming unpermittable in the places that have the least water. Marana memo, California, S. 4213
Trust
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition, with organized groups in 49 states and moratorium bills in 14. Audits have cut claimed job counts by two thirds, and the average subsidy works out to about $1.95 million per permanent job. Insurers now sell policies against community backlash. Data Center Watch, Good Jobs First, Insurance Journal
What a switch can do about it, and what it cannot.
It cannot fix the grid. Networking is 4.5% of US data center electricity, up from 3.4% in 2018 and rising with every generation of accelerator fabric. Putting optical switches in the spine removes about 41% of that. Across a facility that is 2 to 3% of the load. We say that number on every page because the communities we live in have heard enough multipliers.
It uses no water. The switch has no electronics in the data path and no transceivers at the switch, so it makes almost no heat. Every watt it removes is a watt the cooling plant does not reject and, in an evaporatively cooled building, water that does not leave the tower. The energy page turns that into liters for any facility you name.
It makes the next gigawatt come from efficiency instead of interconnection. When utilities cannot serve new load, the only growth left is more computing per megawatt. In-workload optical reconfiguration has been shown to raise tokens per joule by up to 1.75 times when the switch is fast enough, under 100 microseconds, to reconfigure inside a training step rather than between jobs. That threshold is the reason a microsecond switch exists. ACTINA, SC25
It is a reportable line item. Germany requires facilities over 300 kW to report energy and waste heat and to reach a PUE of 1.5 by 2027. The EU database starts at 500 kW. California starts at 10 MW. An optical spine is a measurable reduction in the one part of the facility these reports will soon break out. Columbia Climate Law
What we hold ourselves to.
Numbers with sources
Every figure on this site links to the paper, datasheet, or filing it came from, and the energy model is public. We would rather be checked than believed.
Measured before marketed
We separate what prototypes measured from what the next chip is designed to do, on every page, in those words.
Built here
The switch was invented at the University of Arizona and will be developed with the optics industry that grew up around it. The company's interest and the county's are the same: more computing per megawatt and per liter.