Which Phoenix Neighborhoods Are Actually Affected and the Questions Every Buyer Should Ask

By Lauren Rosin, Founder of The Rosin Team at eXp Realty | Real Estate Strategy for Executives 8-minute read

Seventy-one data center campuses are planned or operating in Maricopa County, and Phoenix now trails only Ashburn, Virginia, in North American absorption.[1]

Somewhere between those facts and the dinner-table version of them, something gets lost.

Buyers in Arrowhead Ranch hear that the Valley is being paved over with server farms. Buyers in Ocotillo hear that the water is running out. Neither reflects what the record shows—and neither replaces the parcel-level questions that actually protect a real estate purchase.

Lauren Rosin, recognized among Arizona’s leading real estate professionals for strategy and investment and founder of The Rosin Team, wrote this article for one reason: The buyers asking the loudest questions about data centers rarely live anywhere near one, while the buyers who do live near one often do not know which questions to ask.

Here is a closer look at the map, the machinery, and the buyer checklist.

Where Phoenix-Area Data Center Campuses Actually Sit

The buildout is concentrated, not evenly distributed—and that concentration is the key to understanding its residential impact.

The West Valley Corridor

The West Valley carries the heaviest concentration of data center development.

Microsoft paid $258 million in cash for 283 acres in El Mirage in May 2024, split across two transactions that closed on the same day. By late 2025, the company had quietly added approximately 280 more acres in the same submarket.[2]

Vantage Data Centers has committed more than $1.5 billion to a single Goodyear campus. Prime Data Centers selected Avondale partly because its power costs were reported to be 16% to 18% below national averages.

In April 2025, Aligned Data Centers broke ground on a 100-acre Glendale campus—the first of four planned facilities at the site—supported by a new 230-kilovolt Arizona Public Service transmission line.[3]

The Mesa Corridor

Southeast Mesa contains another major cluster, with campuses owned by Apple, Meta, and Google positioned along the Elliot Road alignment.

These facilities are being joined by Edged’s new 36-megawatt development, designed specifically to support artificial intelligence inference workloads.[4]

Phoenix Infill Locations

Central Phoenix hosts smaller urban facilities, including the AZP campuses near East Roosevelt Street. These sites are different in scale and setting from the expansive hyperscale campuses found farther west and southeast.

The Pinal County Frontier

Farther south, the proposed Vermaland Data Center Park encompasses approximately 3,300 acres near Eloy.

This project is more relevant to land investors monitoring San Tan Valley, Gold Canyon, and the broader Pinal County growth corridor than to buyers concerned about an immediate residential fence line.

Which Phoenix Neighborhoods Are Not in the Primary Data Center Corridors?

Now read the location list in reverse.

Paradise Valley is not on it. Neither are Silverleaf, DC Ranch, Troon, Arcadia, the Biltmore, McCormick Ranch, Gainey Ranch, Willo, Coronado, or Encanto.

Hyperscale data center operators pursue three things: transmission capacity, industrial zoning, and large parcels of relatively inexpensive contiguous land. The Valley’s established luxury core generally offers none of the three.

In other words, the areas causing buyers the most concern are often the areas with the least direct exposure.

How Data Centers Are Actually Cooled

The water question deserves a mechanical answer, not simply a reassuring one. Three very different technologies are often discussed under the single heading of “data center cooling.”

Evaporative Cooling

Evaporative cooling is the legacy design behind many of the alarming water-use headlines.

Warm air passes across wetted media, and the evaporating water carries heat away from the equipment. The system works exceptionally well in dry climates, but the water used in the process is continuously consumed.

Closed-Loop Air Cooling

Closed-loop systems use a fixed amount of coolant and recirculate it through heat exchangers rather than continually consuming water.

Aligned’s Glendale campus pairs the company’s Delta³ air-cooling arrays—which capture heat at its source—with this type of closed-loop recycling system.[3]

Direct Liquid and Chip-Level Cooling

Direct liquid cooling takes coolant directly to the processor. It supports much higher equipment density while eliminating the need for evaporative cooling.

Microsoft has announced that every data center it designs from August 2024 forward will use a closed-loop, zero-water evaporation architecture. The company plans to pilot the design at its Phoenix-area facility under construction in 2026.[5]

Edged’s Mesa facility uses ThermalWorks waterless cooling and is projected to conserve more than 138 million gallons of water annually compared with a conventional evaporative system.[4]

Google’s Mesa facility also uses no water for cooling—a design decision made in direct response to the region’s water constraints.[2]

The direction of the industry is clear: New Arizona campuses are increasingly being designed around waterless cooling. Air and liquid cooling technologies have become more financially competitive, and eliminating water consumption also reduces a significant permitting and operational risk.

What the Water Numbers Actually Show

Ceres estimated that the data centers operating in Phoenix last summer used approximately 385 million gallons of water annually. Its worst-case projection placed potential future consumption at approximately 3.8 billion gallons per year as the market’s data center buildout matures.[6]

Even under that worst-case scenario, data centers would account for roughly 1% of the Phoenix metro area’s residential water consumption and less than one-half of 1% of the region’s total 2024 water use.[6]

For perspective, agriculture consumes more than 70% of Arizona’s water statewide and still accounts for approximately 35% of water use within the Phoenix metro area—the state’s most urbanized region.

Metro industrial water use has remained relatively flat for years, led by golf courses, power plants, and metal mines. In Mesa, which hosts both Apple and Meta data center clusters, industrial users accounted for approximately 6% of the city’s total potable water demand in 2024.[6]

That does not mean the issue should be dismissed.

The more serious concern, as water researchers frame it, is opportunity cost. When a water provider allocates part of its 100-year portfolio to a data center, that water is committed and cannot later be assigned to another use.[7]

That is a legitimate regional planning issue. It is also fundamentally different from asking whether a homeowner’s tap will run dry.

These allocation decisions belong under careful public review—and that debate is happening where it should: through utility planning, permitting processes, and city council proceedings.

Why Arizona Residents Can Be Confident About Their Water Supply

Arizona has structural protections that many rapidly growing states never established.

The 1980 Groundwater Management Act requires developers within Active Management Areas—which include the Phoenix metropolitan area—to demonstrate a 100-year assured water supply before residential lots can be sold.

In 2026, Governor Katie Hobbs signed a proclamation marking the first implementation of the Alternative Designation of Assured Water Supply program. The new pathway is intended to support additional housing while preserving Arizona’s groundwater protections.[8]

Municipalities are also creating additional safeguards:

Chandler limits data center water use to 115 gallons per day per 1,000 square feet.
Marana prohibits data centers from using potable water.
Tucson’s City Council rejected the proposed Project Blue campus following resident opposition. The developer subsequently returned with a commitment to zero-water cooling.[6]

The variable that deserves the closest long-term attention is the Colorado River.

The 2007 Interim Guidelines and the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan expire at the end of 2026, and the seven Colorado River Basin states have twice failed to reach an agreement on the rules that will replace them.[9]

Arizona holds a structurally junior position within the existing priority system and has proposed reductions of up to 27% under shortage conditions.[10]

Those negotiations will influence Arizona’s long-term water outlook far more than all 71 data center campuses combined. Residential users also remain high in the priority structure that determines which users absorb reductions first.

The 11 Questions Buyers Should Ask Before Writing an Offer

The Rosin Team reviews these questions for every purchase located within three miles of a planned or operating data center campus.

Surrounding Land and Zoning

What is the current zoning on every adjacent or nearby parcel?
Is data center use permitted by right, or would it require a conditional-use permit and public hearing?
Has any property within two miles been rezoned or annexed during the past 36 months?

The Facility

Who is the operator, and what cooling architecture is specified in the permit filings—closed-loop, evaporative, or hybrid?
What water usage effectiveness figure has the operator committed to meeting?

Noise and Lighting

Where are the generator yards and chiller banks located in relation to the residential property line?
What are the facility’s permitted generator-testing hours?

Steady-state data center operations are typically quiet. Scheduled generator testing is more often the source of noise complaints.

Power Infrastructure

Which utility serves the data center parcel, and is new transmission infrastructure planned nearby?
Is there a pending large-load tariff proceeding before the Arizona Corporation Commission that could affect the project or surrounding utility infrastructure?

Water Supply

Does the serving water provider have a designated assured water supply, and how much of its portfolio has already been committed to industrial users?

Construction and Resale

What are the proposed construction haul routes and build duration—and how have comparable residential sales within one mile of an operating campus performed during the past 24 months?

The multi-year construction phase is often more disruptive than the completed facility. Fortunately, enough Arizona data centers are now operating that buyers can review actual comparable sales rather than relying on speculation.

The Bottom Line

The Phoenix area’s data center wave is large, real, and concentrated primarily within the West Valley and southeast Mesa corridors—areas that sit outside much of the Valley’s traditional luxury residential map.

The direct water risk is smaller than the headlines often suggest, while the zoning, infrastructure, and long-term planning considerations are more important than many buyers realize.

None of these factors is automatically a reason to avoid a neighborhood. They are reasons to ask specific, answerable questions during the first week of escrow—when buyers still have the opportunity to investigate the property, evaluate the surrounding area, and make an informed decision.

That is precisely when Lauren Rosin and The Rosin Team ask them.

Considering a Home Purchase in Greater Phoenix?

Whether you are evaluating a luxury neighborhood, relocating to the Valley, or purchasing near one of Arizona’s fastest-growing employment corridors, the location of planned infrastructure matters.

Lauren Rosin and The Rosin Team help buyers evaluate more than the home itself—from zoning and nearby development to water planning, utility infrastructure, resale potential, and long-term investment strategy.

Contact The Rosin Team to make your next Phoenix-area purchase with clarity, confidence, and a complete understanding of what surrounds it.