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Amazon has left the embattled project because its operations aren't compatible with the project's recently announced plans to use air cooling instead of water cooling of the data centers' servers, the sources said.

Instead, the Project Blue developer, Beale Infrastructure, is negotiating with Meta, the company that operates Facebook, to replace Amazon as the center's operator, they said.

"Amazon is out because they can't live with air cooling," one source told the Star.

Project Blue switched to plans for an air-cooled operation after the Tucson City Council voted unanimously in August to kill its effort to be annexed into the city and to receive city water supplies for its operations. Project Blue officials had pledged to build a $100 million pipeline to deliver reclaimed water to the data centers. But outside critics said the city would be unable to effectively enforce those and other water-related requirements for the project, including a commitment by the company to be "water positive," or use no more water than it can replace with other, outside sources.

Meta, on its website, has said that its data centers operating in the U.S. have electricity use that "is matched with 100% clean and renewable energy by adding new projects to the grid, which also helps decarbonize the electricity system." That policy puts Meta in line with the written commitment expressed by Beale to use 100% renewable energy sources to power Project Blue.

The project would be located on 290 acres of land lying near the Pima County Fairgrounds. Officials have said the site could play host to as many as 10 individual data centers.

The reports of Amazon's departure from the project come as Pima County officials are negotiating with Beale officials over details of how the project would be operated. County officials have pushed to get Beale to put into a written, legally enforceable agreement its publicly made commitments to use 100% renewables and to not use any potable water except for routine drinking purposes and other office-related uses. So far, no agreement has been reached to put those commitments into writing, along with requests from county supervisors that Beale commit to using unionized workers.

All three sources declined to go on the record, in order to preserve their ability to get information about the project from other confidential sources, they told the Star.

Beale officials didn't immediately respond to requests from the Star to confirm the sources' reports about Amazon leaving the project or that they're negotiating with Meta to replace Amazon.

Beale, in fact, has never publicly admitted to any plans to use Amazon as operator for Project Blue's data centers, which could number up to 10 individual centers. However, two county memos from 2023 named Amazon Web Services as the future Project Blue operator. In one of them, county officials pledged to keep Amazon's identity secret for up to 5 years.

In a statement after the Star story about Amazon's pullout was posted online, a group opposing data centers, the No Desert Data Center Coalition, said of Project Blue: "The AI bubble is about to burst and their deal is falling apart. It doesn't matter what Big Tech company Beale is negotiating with, the story is the same everywhere Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk build their data centers: energy bills skyrocket and communities are harmed."