PRESS RELEASE
NEW: Lombardo Takes Data Centers’ Cash While Ford Outlines How He’ll Crack Down On Them
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New reporting found that days before Joe Lombardo publicly embraced data centers, he took $1 million from AI billionaires Ben and Felicia Horowitz – and a week later, he took another $1 million from a multi-millionaire family that’s building dozens of data centers in Nevada. It’s the latest instance of Lombardo “taking care of his billionaire friends”, which he admitted was his priority while standing next to Trump at his recent Vegas rally. Data centers are getting a huge return on investment from buying Lombardo’s support – he’s funneled over $200 million in tax breaks to data centers in just 2023 and 2024 alone, while the working Nevadans he’s supposed to serve are struggling to afford rent, bills, prescription meds, and school meals for their kids.
While Lombardo and Donald Trump share the same MAGA billionaire data center donors and cheerlead for for their continued unrestricted development, Aaron Ford is speaking with Nevadans about his plan to make data centers pay up and block them from raising Nevadans’ costs. Ford held a press conference today blasting Lombardo for letting data centers break the rules, dodge accountability, and threaten Nevada’s water and energy resources.
READ MORE: Nevada Governor Backed Data Centers Days After $1 Million Donation
The revelation comes as the driest state in the nation grapples with data centers’ enormous resource demands. Fueled by $340 million in state tax abatements since 2021, Nevada has roughly 70 data centers in operation, under construction, or being planned. But amid new research suggesting the industry’s expansion could triple the state’s energy demands and consume as much water annually as roughly 150,000 households, cities and counties across the Silver State have begun issuing moratoriums on new data centers.
The matter could become a pivotal election issue. Lombardo’s Democratic opponent, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, has criticized the incumbent’s stance on data centers and just sued the federal government over cuts to its already strained Colorado River allocation. (Lombardo also supports the lawsuit.)
This month, Lombardo told the Latin Chamber of Commerce that data centers could be a “new gold rush,” if the proper guardrails are in place. Standing beside President Donald Trump at a different event, he also voiced his support for Trump’s “billionaire friends” because “those billionaire friends provide jobs. And unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent.”
A January report from the Desert Research Institute, a science nonprofit, found that in 2024, data centers consumed 22 percent of the state’s electrical generation, an amount that the institute predicted could grow to 35 percent by 2030. The same report found that the state’s current development plans could result in data centers consuming up to 16 billion gallons of water annually, according to calculations by The Lever — enough for roughly 150,000 households a year.
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