technology ·
California’s Bay Area debates data centres ahead of US midterm elections
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. “Power prices have gone up so much in Oakland that some people are thinking of shutting off their power,” said Carlos Gutierrez, an activist for Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental justice group.
“And the city is planning to provide power to a data centre instead.” Opposition to data centres is growing across the United States, as residents express concern about their rapid expansion.
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.
