“The questions are, who has the authority, and more potentially complicating, whether the Upper Basin would assert that they need to approve of this exchange,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

I spoke with Sarah Porter at Arizona State University, the Kyle Water Center, and she said she had looked at litigation that involves the Colorado River Compact over time.

And it is rare when it happens, but it can take an average of eight years to see these cases come to a resolution.

“I think if this had been a 2 million-acre-foot problem, the states probably could have solved it, but it’s potentially a 4 million-acre-foot problem,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a researcher and professor at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. “There’s so little water to go around that positions have become hardened as a result. We’re not just talking about inconvenient cuts; we’re talking about severe pain to economies at this point.”

Cynthia Campbell, the director of policy innovation for the Arizona Water Innovation Institute at Arizona State University, said that the “honest but unspoken truth” is that the 2007 compact likely overestimated the amount of water that can be reliably drawn. 

As a consequence, she added, we’ve repeatedly overdrawn so much that we’re now facing very difficult choices. She’s doubtful that states will manage to agree, and that even if they do, their cuts won’t be nearly drastic enough. During prior negotiations, states in the lower basin have offered to cut their water usage by between 10% and 27%.

"This is unprecedented," said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. "For all these years, the states have been able to reach consensus, and they simply haven't been able to come up with an agreement that they could all sign on to."

“This is the second time the Bureau of Reclamation has given us a deadline without a consequence,” Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University told The Guardian. “A deadline without a consequence is just a date.”

“Every city is in a different state of preparedness for what’s to come,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

“The biggest risk for Arizona is that the people from Phoenix to Tucson who use Colorado River water. They get their water from the Central Arizona Project canal. Those users are junior in priority to other users in the lower basin,” Porter said.

It’s tough to estimate how much water data centers use for cooling, said Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. But power generation for all users — not just data centers — makes up 3% of the state’s water demand.

“This is unprecedented,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “For all these years, the states have been able to reach consensus, and they simply haven’t been able to come up with an agreement that they could all sign on to.”