San Francisco banning data facilities, while Santa Clara is building more | Latest Tech News
Santa Clara is home to some of the most important tech firms in the world: Nvidia, Intel and AMD, so it is no surprise town is embracing the data middle increase.
The south San Francisco Bay Area city has 58 data facilities, the densest cluster on the West Coast, and is spending $459 million to double its energy grid so it might construct more. Almost all lie within the bounds of town and its neighbor, Mountain View.
But Santa Clara residents reap rewards, as local utility company Silicon Valley Power — owned by the City of Santa Clara — costs 18.2 cents a kilowatt-hour, 57% less than the 42.2 cents Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the non-public utility serving most of Northern California, costs.
An aerial view of Nvidia Headquarters is seen in Santa Clara, California, on June 2, 2026. Anadolu via Getty Images
Stack Infrastructure’s SVY02A data middle project is seen in Santa Clara, California, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. Stack Infrastructure, a unit of Blue Owl Capital Inc., owns the 48 megawatt data middle that is vacant while the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, upgrades its capability, a course of anticipated to take until 2028. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Santa Clara also collects an estimated $29.5 million a 12 months from the server farms that ring its house blocks, which will get spent on police, parks, libraries and other resident providers.
“Our bills are about $130 for the electricity, the garbage and the water,” a resident at Santa Clara Square, an house complicated surrounded by data facilities, told the Post.
“If they’re gonna construct more data facilities, then I’d need to see … a lower in rent, or the electrical energy payments.
The resident said she has lived at the Square for almost 5 years and didn’t understand how many data facilities surrounded it. “For now, it doesn’t bother me,” she added.
Meanwhile a former Santa Clara resident told the Post their electrical energy invoice jumped fivefold after transferring away.
Forty miles north, San Francisco County has 15 data facilities. There, supervisors are pushing a 45-day moratorium on new ones, citing the burden on the Bayview, a neighborhood with a long historical past of pollution.
“We need to know all the impacts of having a data center in the community before we allow another to come inside of San Francisco,” Supervisor Shamann Walton, who wrote the measure, said at a City Hall press convention Monday.
Candidate Shamann Walton, operating for board of supervisors district 10, speaks to the San Francisco Chronicle during an editorial board assembly on Friday, September 21, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif. San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
The two cities aren’t constructed alike. San Francisco packs about 800,000 people into 47 sq. miles — roughly 18,600 people per sq. mile, according to the Census Bureau — so nearly any web site for a data middle may have houses close by.
Santa Clara spreads 133,000 people across 18 sq. miles, about a third as dense, with a broad industrial belt of workplace parks and chip plants where most of the data facilities cluster.
Santa Clara’s neighboring counties, San Mateo and Alameda, at present have two data facilities and 14 respectively, according to the US Data Center Map — and there was local backlash against building additional services in both.
Nearly seven in 10 Americans say they’d oppose a data middle in their neighborhood, according to a Gallup ballot in May — more than oppose nuclear energy plants.
Demonstrators wave indicators during a nationwide protest against AI data middle enlargement in Imperial, California, Saturday, July 18, 2026. AFP via Getty Images
However, the very time period “data center” has grow to be loaded.
“There are many different kinds of data centers,” identified Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who has studied them for more than a quarter-century.
“Smaller data centers that are properly run, that do not have their own [power] generation only have the impact of a big warehouse or an office building.”
Koomey advises AMD on effectivity objectives and receives Amazon funding for research on data-center water use.
Many people have also raised issues about water use, but a May 2025 Valley Water briefing made clear most Santa Clara data facilities use recycled water — handled wastewater from showers and bathrooms.
Data middle researcher Jonathan Koomey, who advises some of tech’s largest firms.
“It’s not clean enough to drink. You wouldn’t want people to drink it,” Koomey said. “But it’s perfectly fine for watering golf courses or for cooling a data center.”
Using recycled water, he said, retains a data middle’s water footprint to a minimal. But each facility handles water use otherwise, he added.
Sata Clara says those building the data facilities pay their own connection prices plus a share of wider system upgrades. As an instance, town’s servers need more energy than the local substation can deal with, so Intel is footing the entire invoice to increase it — plus about $10 million in charges for the additional load, a February council report exhibits.
“It’s very important for the people who are imposing costs on society to pay those costs,” Koomey famous.
Not everybody is offered. The metropolis documented complaints about noise, top and look after one facility went up on Memorex Drive.
Meanwhile, some local residents have developed their own measures of the affect on the atmosphere. One resident watches fish and birds at a local creek told The Post: “If I started to see an impact on the wildlife that is thriving off that creek, then I would probably be more concerned or have a problem with it.”
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