The AI data center boom is bringing hope to struggling cannabis farmers as they face increased competition, costs, and taxes amid reduced demand for marijuana. According to Arizona Public Media, the cannabis industry is in decline, with sales peaking in 2024 and oversupply driving prices down. And now, several growers are considering selling their cultivation facilities or converting them into “mini data center nodes.” These facilities already have many of the ingredients needed for AI data centers, such as the increasingly hard-to-get supply of electricity and water infrastructure.

"For some reason, there's a lot more cannabis grown in Arizona than Arizonans use. And so, a lot of folks are getting out of that business, like myself, at least on the cultivation side. But these facilities can potentially be repurposed to be mini data center nodes," Moe Asnani, the former owner of two Tucson D2 Dispensaries, told the public broadcaster. He also added, "The whole idea is if you create these smaller nodes where people control their own data, where they're not at the mercy of other people's updates and things like that — that's kind of where the idea came in, because I believe in decentralization."

Cannabis farming is both power- and water-intensive. 5 megawatts in under a year and 15 megawatts in the long term. It's also provisioned for fiber internet and equipped with a state-of-the-art HVAC system for climate control, which should make it a tempting property for anyone wanting to put up a small data center — something that even OpenAI and Anthropic are interested in as massive hyperscale sites face opposition from the community.

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