His strip club was closed – so he decided to become the king of California's server farms

Sebastian Rocci (65), an attorney specializing in planning and construction law and a real estate developer, has known throughout his career how to identify economic opportunities and enter fields where he saw potential. In 2007, he established the "Go-Go Girls Cabaret" strip club in Ohio, which became a focal point for legal disputes and negative coverage. A few years later, he closed the club, purchased the complex where it was located, and opened the "Hotel California" there, which he later turned into an addiction treatment center, mainly for discharged soldiers. However, this venture also ran into difficulties: in 2021, federal agents raided the center as part of an investigation into suspicions related to the facility's operation and billing to government insurance programs. Following the investigation and legal issues, the center was closed.

Now, Rocci has found his next big opportunity in Imperial County, California: building the state's largest data center, at an estimated cost of $10 billion. Rocci identified this desert area, which suffers from high unemployment rates but offers vast land areas, as the ideal location for his ambitious project, in the heart of what the media now calls "the data center gold rush in the AI era."

Energy and Environmental Challenges

While county leaders initially embraced the plan, pointing to the potential for about $28 million in annual tax revenue and the creation of jobs in one of California's poorer corners, residents living near the project are less enthusiastic. They have expressed concern primarily about the massive electricity and water consumption of the data center and the impact this will have on the region's resources. According to state data and estimates presented by the project developer, the facility may consume almost twice the amount of electricity that the entire Imperial County used in 2024. In addition, it may require about 750,000 gallons of water per day.

Rocci initially claimed that the cooling system would be based primarily on recycled wastewater in a closed system, thereby significantly reducing the use of Colorado River water. However, after this plan encountered difficulties, he filed a request to receive a water allocation from the river and even filed a lawsuit on the matter, a move that further increased the opposition of residents and environmental organizations to the project.

Ambitions vs. Reputation

Rocci's data center will span a planned area of about 88,000 square meters, consume an electrical capacity of 330 megawatts, and be backed by a huge energy storage system including 220 Tesla Megapack batteries with a total capacity of about 862 megawatt-hours. So far, Rocci has invested about $5 million in the project, and he declares that he does not intend to back down.

Rocci's vision is ambitious: his goal is to turn Imperial County into what he calls "Silicon Border" — a new technological hub, similar to Silicon Valley, that will attract the world's largest AI and computing infrastructure companies. According to him, traditional data centers are approaching the limit of their expansion capacity due to a lack of land, electricity constraints, and high costs, and therefore new areas are becoming more attractive.

Despite the fact that Rocci has never been convicted of a crime, his past raises questions among local activists. Christopher Scris, the high school band director in Imperial, has become one of the sharpest voices against the establishment of the data center. His protest against the project even received a creative expression: he wrote a song that became the unofficial anthem of the small opposition group: "Not in my backyard, Imperial."