Sebastian Rucci pushes $10B Imperial Valley AI data center

A single Huntington Beach lawyer, not a hyperscaler, is the one currently trying to push California's largest AI data center through Imperial County's permit stack, and the way that fight is going is more interesting than the size of the building.

Sebastian Rucci, through his LLC Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, is planning a roughly $10 billion campus rated at up to 330 megawatts and around 950,000 square feet, on 235 acres he has purchased so far, aiming to be operating by summer 2028. The Wall Street Journal profiled Rucci this week, and the numbers line up with the ones showing up in California outlets covering the local fight, including a KPBS investigation into the project.

The water part is where this genuinely gets messy. Rucci says the site would need about 750,000 gallons a day for cooling. Since December, he and his company had repeatedly pledged the project would rely on recycled wastewater from nearby cities and not draw on the Colorado River. Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing is now suing the Imperial Irrigation District for access to 260 million gallons of Colorado River water a year, a reversal that hands every local opponent an easy quote.

The other fight is procedural. The City of Imperial has sued under the California Environmental Quality Act, arguing the project needs a full CEQA review; Rucci's position is that existing industrial zoning already covers it and no further review is required. Local voters are gathering signatures for a referendum to ban data centers in the county outright. The pitch to Imperial is real money on paper, roughly $28 million a year in tax revenue, 1,600-plus construction jobs and about 100 permanent positions, but those numbers have to survive both the referendum and the courts.

Rucci himself is part of the story because of an Ohio history the WSJ leans into. He previously owned a strip club and later a rehabilitation center in Youngstown and was charged alongside others with money laundering, promoting prostitution and perjury tied to the nightclub. Those charges were eventually thrown out, some because the case took too long to go to trial. His only conviction was selling beer at the club with an expired license in 2014, for which he served 30 days in jail. Take that as color rather than a verdict on the project.

The honest caveat is what the reporting doesn't give you: no named hyperscale tenant, no disclosed financing stack behind the $10 billion figure, and no plan B if the Colorado River suit loses. What's worth watching is the template. If a solo developer can carry a gigawatt-class site through CEQA and a county referendum without a marquee anchor, a lot of speculative California AI campuses that have been quietly waiting on hyperscaler contracts suddenly get a much cheaper path to breaking ground.