Oakland, California – Protesters dressed as cardboard robots chanted and danced to a drumbeat as they protested against new data centres outside Oakland City Hall last month. Their concerns largely focused on how the centres — which process large amounts of digital information — might strain the energy grid. The result, they argued, would not only be environmental harm but also sky-high electricity bills for local households.
More than 3,000 data centres already operate in the country, with more than 1,500 others in development, according to the Pew Research Center. But the backlash is perhaps most striking in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, a region considered to be the heart of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. Major AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta are based in the Bay Area, and the industry’s growth has been credited with fuelling a local economic renaissance.
Data centres house the advanced computer chips and servers needed to run AI-powered services such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But they also require 24-hour power and a large supply of water to cool their processors. Even with such cooling technology, data centres are notorious for emitting heat, leading to an increase in land surface temperatures as high as 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit).
Concerns about the cost of rapid data centre growth, both environmentally and financially, have catapulted the issue into the discourse around Tuesday’s midterm elections. In the final two months before the vote, at least seven Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Richmond, have passed temporary moratoriums on data centre construction. They include Oakland, which passed a data centre moratorium on October 6, after days of protest.
Local politicians competing in Tuesday’s midterms have also used the topic as a wedge issue, to rally support among certain pockets of voters. One of the most closely watched races in the Bay Area is for the seat left vacant by longtime Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. After 39 years in the House of Representatives, Pelosi is retiring at the end of the year.
Two Democrats are competing in Tuesday’s election to fill her position in Congress: San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan and state Senator Scott Wiener. Each one has staked out a different position on AI data centres. Wiener, for instance, opposes any ban on data centres.
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