The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

Melinda Matson Spina
Many Tucsonans are questioning how Project Blue could affect our region. I鈥檓 broaching the topic of why Project Blue is here.
Amazon is Project Blue鈥檚 end user, and the Department of Defense is Amazon鈥檚 biggest customer. Amazon Web Services makes more money through the military than its top five corporate clients, combined.
In 2022, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle received a $9B contract called the JWCC, to provide hyperscale U.S. military cloud requirements into 2028. That鈥檚 an average of $37M per month, per company. Around the same time, we started hearing about drastic changes planned for military use of civilian airspace in Arizona. Artificial intelligence also hit the public stage that year, soon followed by unbridled promotion of an AI arms race.
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Between then and now, the U.S. empowered a more concentrated level of military-industrial buildup and warfare than the earth has seen in half a century.
Tucson suddenly became home to the third (AFSOC) Air Force Special Operations hub. AFSOC previously led U.S. drone warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Southern Arizona has the largest unmanned aircraft training facility on the planet, at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista. Raytheon is developing AI-integrated hypersonic missiles nearby; while a second hypersonic missile company, Castelion, has been asked to expand into Arizona by Senator Mark Kelly. Military officers have made public remarks that Southern Arizona will also absorb the newly established U.S. Space Force Southern Command.
Four months ago, in March 2025, the federal government announced that the next iteration of its military cloud procurement with Amazon and other providers, called JWCC Next, will be similar to the $9B JWCC, 鈥渂ut at a bigger scale.鈥 Almost simultaneously, it issued a Request for Information to gauge industry interest in developing a data center on up to 620 acres in Tucson, with options to grow.
Design, operation, and sales of surveillance, missiles, and unmanned aircraft is now an AI-data-driven industry in an AI-data-driven arms race that no amount of minerals, water, and electricity will ultimately satisfy.
That is why the logistics surrounding Project Blue, as a Pima County Supervisor said, defy logic. Because there is no logic in great power competition at the pace of AI. The breakneck military-industrial buildup is leaving dangerous gaps, and the attendant warfare is a stain on humanity that history that will never wash away.
Pima supervisors were told of Project Blue, 鈥淭ucson is going to be on everybody鈥檚 radar in the world.鈥 How, exactly, should Tucson be known to the rest of the world? Do Goliath investors in imprudent competition for unipolar primacy and space-age weapons get to decide? Because it looks like the future is actually in diplomatic cooperation for multipolar peace agreements, and among other things, space-age trains.
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Melinda Matson Spina is a writer, Army brat and desert rat.