SAVRN.
Imperial County, California

A campus the Valley owns a stake in — not just hosts.

The SAVRN Imperial Valley Intelligence Center is a locally operated intelligence and learning campus, built on the site of a retired biomass power plant — a brownfield idle since 2008, brought back to work with new on-site generation. The campus's power operates under the site's own existing water rights — and the data center itself uses no water to cool its computers, only ordinary human water for restrooms and handwashing. It opens with a Community Learning Center — because the point is not to put a building in the Valley. It is to put the Valley in the AI economy.

Rendering of the Imperial Valley campus: research and learning center fronting modular compute blocks in the desert
0 galwater used to cool the data center's computers — its only water use is human: restrooms and handwashing
On-site powercore power generated on site at the redeveloped Mesquite Lake energy site, under its own existing water rights — not a new burden on the Valley's grid or water supply
50 seats/yrtwo 25-person training cohorts a year at the on-campus Community Learning Center
15+ paidpaid work-based learning placements each year, each with a mentor and a written skill plan
50%local-resident hiring goal for permanent Phase 1 operating roles by Year 3
$250K/yrin-kind compute and technical support reserved for Valley schools, agencies, and community projects
Why this matters here

The Valley deserves careers that don't require leaving.

Imperial County has the talent and the training institutions. What it has lacked is a place where that training leads to durable, well-paid technical work at home. That is the gap this campus is designed to close — not with a slogan about jobs, but with a school, a paycheck, and a ladder.

16.9%El Centro MSA unemployment (May 2026) vs 5.3% statewide
$57,681median household income, Imperial County (2020–2024)
18.8%of residents living in poverty
16.1%of adults hold a bachelor's degree — talent leaves to advance

Imperial Valley College already teaches electrical technology, HVAC/R, welding, water treatment, industrial automation, computer networking, and cybersecurity. The Intelligence Center connects that existing pipeline to real paid roles on a real campus — instead of importing its workforce.

A different approach

The Valley is right to ask hard questions of data centers.

Residents are already debating a very different proposal nearby — a roughly 950,000-square-foot, water-cooled facility that asks the community to supply hundreds of megawatts of new grid service and, per public accounts, up to 750,000 gallons of water per day. The questions being asked of that project are fair. Here is how this project answers them.

The water-dependent proposal
The Intelligence Center
Water
A water-cooled design supported by draft recycled-water studies, with a reported supply request of up to 750,000 gallons per day — in a valley where every drop is already spoken for.
Zero water to cool the data center — none. The campus's power plant does use water, as power plants do, but under the site's own existing water rights: no new claim on the Valley's supply, no recycled-water contract, no 750,000-gallon ask. The campus's only other water use is human — restrooms and handwashing — disclosed and reported annually.
Power
Published utility studies for 250–330 MW of new grid service — making IID capacity, and every other ratepayer's future, part of the project's supply chain.
Core power generated on site — a retired Valley energy site, idle since 2008, redeveloped into the campus's own energy island. The campus does not depend on new grid supply to operate — the community's grid capacity is not this project's fuel.
Scale
A full-size build proposed up front — whose own traffic study found the planned driveway unacceptable without signalization and turn-lane mitigation.
A phased campus that earns each phase. Expansion happens only after the previous phase's community results are published — and the project pays for every road and access improvement its studies require.
Jobs
A capital-intensive facility with a modest permanent headcount, offered to the community as "a data center creates jobs."
A school on the campus, not a slogan. A physical Community Learning Center, 50 funded training seats a year, 15+ paid placements, and a 50% local-hire goal for permanent roles — careers built here, for people who live here.
The Valley's role
Host. The community supplies land, water, power, and roads — and watches the value leave on a fiber line.
Owner and user. Schools, water agencies, farms, and local businesses get governed access to the computing itself — plus public reporting, an advisory group, and a scorecard the community can hold up.
Four commitments, made together

What the Valley gets — and how you'll know it's real.

01

Career access

A physical Community Learning Center on campus from Phase 1 — classrooms, a secure computing lab, simulation workstations, and a workbench floor — with a locally recruited, paid pathway into power-plant operations, electrical, controls, networking, security, and AI-infrastructure careers. Curriculum co-designed with Imperial Valley College within 120 days of the project's final investment decision.

02

Useful local capacity

Secure compute, data, and recovery services that Valley institutions can actually use — for agriculture, water, education, emergency preparedness, and industrial operations. No school district or water agency should have to hand its data to a distant cloud to benefit from AI.

03

Responsible infrastructure

On-site power at a redeveloped brownfield energy site, operating under its own existing water rights. A data center that uses no water for cooling — its only water use is human. Traffic and access improvements funded by the project, not the public. Biological monitoring and mitigation — including protections for the burrowing owls documented in regional surveys — paid for by the project.

04

Local economic circulation

Construction, energy-site redevelopment, and operating procurement that gives qualified Valley firms a real path to compete: a published bid calendar, at least four local supplier workshops, a local-vendor registry, and public reporting of the share of addressable spend awarded locally.

The Community Learning Center

Learn on the same campus where the work is done.

  • Two 25-person cohorts a year — 50 funded seats across power-plant operations, electrical, instrumentation & controls, network operations, cyber and physical security, and data-center safety.
  • 15+ paid work-based placements annually after the first cohort — each with a named mentor, safety training, and a written skill plan. Paid. Not "exposure."
  • A bridge from IVC, not a bypass around it — the curriculum extends the college's existing electrical, automation, networking, and cybersecurity programs into real roles.
  • A public ladder — roles, qualifications, pay ranges, and promotion criteria published, from technician to shift lead to controls and network specialist.
  • Open doors — apprenticeships, internships, teacher and faculty immersion days, and supervised lab access for students and community organizations.
Power-plant operationsElectricalInstrumentation & controlsNetwork operationsCybersecurityPhysical securityData-center safety
SAVRN Community Learning Center design: families and residents exploring exhibits and workshop spaces
The Community Learning Center design — open to residents and families, on the same campus where the work is done.
Orbital 1

High school

Dual-enrollment and career-exposure pathways with Valley high schools, feeding into the Institute.

Orbital 2

SAVRN Institute certificate

A stackable certificate (288–528 clock hours) with a paid placement on the operating campus.

Orbital 3

IVC associate degree

Certificates stack into associate-degree pathways delivered with Imperial Valley College — which also offers a four-year B.S. in Industrial Automation.

Orbital 4

Bachelor's — in the Valley

SDSU Imperial Valley operates in Calexico and Brawley — criminal justice, public administration, nursing, public health, and graduate programs including homeland security.

Every rung of the ladder is inside Imperial County. A student can climb from a high-school classroom to a paid technical career — and on to a bachelor's degree — without ever leaving the Valley. That is the gap this campus closes: not the absence of talent, but the absence of a ladder. Explore The Orbital — the full ladder, in depth →

The SAVRN Institute

The curriculum isn't a promise. It's already built.

The Community Learning Center delivers the SAVRN Institute — the workforce school SAVRN ships with every campus it builds. A complete AI-infrastructure curriculum exists today: departments, courses, hands-on lab procedures written against real AI-factory systems, stackable certificates, and associate-degree pathways — adapted with Imperial Valley College for the Valley.

34courses across 8 departments, including a 5-course common core every student shares
3,224instructional hours in the full curriculum — 1,872 of them (58%) hands-on lab
22step-by-step lab procedures taught on 11 real AI-factory systems — students train on the equipment they will maintain
8 → 4stackable certificates (288–528 clock hours each) that build into 4 associate-degree pathways
DCO

Data Center Operations

4 courses
NET

Network Engineering

4 courses
HIT

Hardware & IT Systems

3 courses
ELV

Electrical Systems — Low Voltage

3 courses
EMV

Electrical Systems — Medium Voltage

5 courses
MEC

Mechanical Systems & Thermal Management

4 courses
SEC

Security — Physical & Cyber

3 courses
SDB

Service Delivery & Business Operations

3 courses
Degree pathways

Four ways up, all stackable

Certificates earned one at a time build into associate-degree pathways: Critical Facilities Operations, Electrical Power & Protection, Liquid-Cooled Mechanical Systems, and AI / Compute Operations. A student can stop at a paying credential — or keep stacking toward a degree.

Industry credentials

Recognized beyond this campus

The curriculum prepares students for credentials employers everywhere recognize — so a graduate's options grow, whether they stay on campus or not.

OSHA 30NFPA 70E arc-flashCompTIA Server+CompTIA Network+CompTIA Security+BICSI DCDC (entry)EPA 608Electrician's-apprentice licensureAI Factory Operator — Level 1
SAVRN campus design: the Training Institute building fronting the modular compute blocks
The SAVRN campus design in the Imperial Valley desert — the Training Institute in front, the compute blocks it teaches on behind.

Counts are drawn from the live SAVRN Institute curriculum system — 344 mapped weekly sessions across the 34 courses. State licensure pathways are adapted to California requirements for the Imperial Valley campus.

The Imperial Valley Compute Commons

The community gets to use the machine.

A defined annual pool of computing, lab time, and technical support — beginning at a $250,000-per-year in-kind allocation once Phase 1 operates — is reserved for Imperial Valley College, schools, nonprofits, public-interest research, and qualified local institutions. Governed, secure, and reviewed annually with a community advisory group. Priority goes to projects with a clear local beneficiary:

Irrigation & crop analytics Water & energy modeling Heat & air-quality analysis Classroom labs & simulation Protected research environments Backup & disaster recovery for local institutions Small-business product development Regional emergency readiness Lithium Valley research

The Lithium Valley priority is deliberate: the county's own initiative to recover lithium from Salton Sea geothermal brine is one of the most important economic efforts in the region. Protected research environments on this campus can give university and public-sector researchers a place to run that work — geothermal modeling, brine chemistry, environmental monitoring — inside the county it belongs to.

The sovereign component

Sovereign means it stays in the Valley.

Most AI infrastructure asks a community to send everything away — its power, its water, its data, its talent — and trust that value comes back. A sovereign campus is built on the opposite principle: what the Valley produces, the Valley keeps.

Your data never leaves the county

Qualified Imperial County public institutions — the County, cities, school districts, water and irrigation agencies — can run AI workloads in governed environments that are processed locally, auditable, never mined, never sold, and never used to train anyone else's models. That covers the records that legally can't wander: student data, health data, justice data, water and grid telemetry.

The number that mattersInstitutions operating under the pledge — with a published annual attestation that zero community data left the county.

Still running when everything else is down

The campus generates its own power and runs its own compute — so it can hold backup and disaster-recovery capacity for qualified local agencies, and priority emergency compute when grid or cloud services fail. The security watch floor is staffed through the Institute's own security and cyber track: local students trained here, defending the Valley's institutions.

The number that mattersAgencies enrolled in recovery coverage — with recovery-test results published every year.

Valley agriculture, governed by growers

Imperial County agriculture is a multi-billion-dollar economy, and farm data — irrigation, yields, soil, water orders — is exactly what growers should never have to surrender to distant platforms. If Valley agriculture wants it, this campus will host and support a grower-governed data cooperative: pooled analytics for irrigation and crop planning, with ownership retained by the growers and access rules set by the growers.

The number that mattersAcres enrolled — with governance seats held by growers, not by SAVRN.

AI that speaks the Valley's languages

More than four in five Imperial County residents are Hispanic, in one of the most heavily Spanish-speaking regions in California. Sovereign, locally run models can be tuned and evaluated for bilingual service delivery — county service navigation, school tutoring support, health-access interpretation — running on the Valley's own infrastructure instead of a generic distant cloud.

The number that mattersBilingual services deployed with local institutions through the Compute Commons.
"We will earn the right to operate here by protecting local resources, paying for our own impacts, and reporting what we deliver."
The project's operating covenant
Accountability you can check

Every promise comes with its proof.

Commitments without measurement are marketing. Each community commitment is paired with the public evidence that shows whether it was kept — published annually, explained when a target is missed.

Annual Community Infrastructure Report

On-site generation and reliability, any grid imports or exports, emissions and permit compliance, traffic improvements completed, and environmental compliance — in plain language, every year.

The number that mattersNew water demanded from the Valley's supply: zero. The plant runs on its own existing water rights; the data center's only water use is human.

Learning Center scorecard

Enrollment, completions, paid placements, job offers, wage bands, and retention at 12 and 24 months. Local-resident share of hires and promotion rates for the operating team.

The number that matters50% local-resident share of permanent Phase 1 hires by Year 3.

Compute Commons annual review

The published allocation, approved projects, student and resident users, lab utilization, and outcomes — reviewed with the advisory group. No sensitive customer or agency data is ever disclosed.

The number that matters$250K/yr in-kind allocation, specified in auditable work credits and support hours.

Independent local advisory group

IVC, workforce, County and municipal, water and energy, and community representatives advise on curriculum, Commons eligibility, and the annual report — with two public briefings a year during development and the first three years of operations.

The number that mattersA public scorecard against every commitment — including the missed ones, with the corrective action.
A project that earns each phase

No promise gets ahead of its proof.

The Valley should never be asked to accept a full build-out on faith. The campus grows in phases, and each phase opens only after the previous one has published its results — for the infrastructure and for the community benefits alike.

Phase 0

Prove the site

The project pays for its own parcel studies, forms the IVC working group, designs the Learning Center, and publishes its principles — before asking for anything.

Phase 1

First block, doors open

The energy plant is commissioned; the Community Learning Center, paid placements, Compute Commons, local procurement program, and first public dashboard all open with it.

Phase 2

Expand on results

Cohorts, local hiring, and community compute scale only after Phase 1 results are published and every community commitment is in good standing.

Phase 3

A regional platform

Expanded research partnerships and capacity — with audited community benefits as a standing condition of growth, not a launch-day press release.

Go deeper

The Orbital

The full education-to-career ladder in depth — dual enrollment, certificates with paid placement, degrees, all in-county.

Climb The Orbital →The whole picture

The Imperial Valley Strategy

The master document — the site, the energy platform, the operating model, and how every part fits together.

Open the strategy →