• Data center-capable land with zoning and path to power is increasingly scarce
• Developer recently unveiled investment and power demand more than doubled for one Maricopa County project
• Maricopa County approved a separate more than 1,000-acre project with 500 MW data center

The data center land market has entered a new phase, with demand for suitable sites far outstripping what’s realistically buildable, Arizona Land Consulting’s founder and CEO told NPM in a recent interview.

Developers and hyperscalers are increasingly seeking data center-capable land with both zoning and a credible path to power.

“When you combine those two factors, there’s very few sites that make sense,” Anita Verma-Lallian said.

The result, she added, is land pricing “through the roof” for sites that can tick both boxes.

Developers are now seriously considering locations they never would have looked at before — purely because they can find power.

That dynamic is playing out across Arizona Land Consulting’s growing portfolio.

Verma-Lallian recently told NPM Arizona Land Consulting’s nearly 1,700-acre Maricopa County, Arizona Hassayampa Ranch hyperscale data center campus has doubled in size, power demand and investment.

The county’s Board of Supervisors approved a zoning change in April allowing two-story, rather than one-story, data centers on the site.

That decision, Verma-Lallian said, lifted the project’s expected capital outlay from USD 25bn to more than USD 50bn and increased projected power demand from 1.5 GW to roughly 3.5 GW across more than 50 planned data center buildings.

Arizona growth

The expanded scale of Hassayampa Ranch could allow it to serve either multiple end users or a single one, she added, with the latter reflecting a broader trend toward larger sites as zoning and power become harder to secure.

Within the greater Phoenix area, the data center market has expanded rapidly, with total inventory reaching 807.3 MW at the end of 2025, up roughly 34% from 602.8 MW a year earlier, according to CBRE data.

To date, NPM is tracking 61 planned, under construction and operational data center projects throughout the county, including the following planned hyperscale projects.

Verma-Lallian said the shift is fueled in part by people and capital moving from California to Arizona in search of lower costs and lighter COVID-era restrictions.

Drawing on a family land business that has tracked Phoenix growth since the mid-1990s, Verma-Lallian launched Arizona Land Consulting in 2019, using her experience to anticipate where power infrastructure is moving and which areas are more likely to support industrial or data center zoning.

“We always try to be early, before everyone else gets to something, because once everyone else is there or talking about it, it’s usually too late,” she said.

The firm does this by buying sites without zoning in place and getting them zoned – something others may not be willing to risk.

Resource availability

Securing those approvals increasingly hinges on resource availability.

While power dominates headlines as a main constraint, Verma-Lallian said water is quietly deciding what actually gets built in key parts of Arizona.

Given Arizona’s arid climate, water availability and restrictions are significant considerations for development, while data centers can use significantly less water than residential or other types of development.

Because of that, Verma-Lallian reasoned data centers became a more practical fit than new housing, since they can generate tax revenue while drawing comparatively less on scarce water resources.

Last week, Maricopa County officials approved rezoning for another Arizona Land Consulting project, a more than 1,000-acre film studio campus that includes a planned 500 MW data center component.

Verma-Lallian said for that project, water rather than power will be the bigger constraint on how quickly and in what phases it can be developed.

Real projects

The success of the current wave of AI and hyperscale demand is also yet to be seen.

Like some other industry executives, Verma-Lallian is skeptical that the current pipeline of announced projects will all come to fruition.

“I’m not sure if all of them are real,” she said. “I think a lot of them may go away in the next five years. Then the projects that are real, those will be the ones that’ll be working with the utilities to secure power.”

That might mean more investment from developers and end users for utility infrastructure, she said.

NPM interconnection queue is tracking more than 38 GW of pre-operational solar, storage, diesel and natural gas APS power projects across Maricopa County.

Verma-Lallian anticipates nuclear playing a larger role, citing both Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) under development and efforts by Arizona utility APS to expand its nuclear capacity,

Power remains “a very regulated industry,” but nuclear additions could move more quickly once state-level approvals are cleared.