John Lorinc is a freelance journalist specializing in cities, climate, and technology. He can be reached at lorinc@rogers.com.

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One by one, the applications fell like dominoes, running headlong into walls of adamant and angry resident opposition.

In El Segundo, a developer pulled a proposed data center during a planning commission meeting. In Coachella, plans for a new electrical utility collapsed after city officials and residents realized it was meant for a potential data center. In Oakley, a developer removed a data center from a 160-acre project at the edge of the city so the proposal could move forward.  

“The developer did it unilaterally,” says Oakley Vice Mayor Aaron Meadows. “He listened to all the comments in the public hearing, and after the public spoke, he went up and said, ‘We’ll just pull the data center component out of it.’”

Perhaps most prominently, Monterey Park got ahead of the backlash by declaring a permanent moratorium on data center projects — an overwhelmingly popular ballot box move that garnered national headlines. “I don’t know if they thought they could just push this project through the community without doing its due diligence,” says Monterey Park Mayor Henry Lo. “But I will say that they didn’t really propose any community meetings until people started coming out during public comment [sessions] to address concerns about water and energy.”

The anxious residents of Coachella, Oakley, and Monterey Park are hardly alone. A July survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that voters overwhelmingly oppose data center construction in their area. Even country music legend Willie Nelson joined the anti-data center fight in late July.

But the anti-data center movement has some local officials worried about their economic development plans. El Segundo officials regarded the 130,000-square-foot “AI inference center” as compatible with other uses in the city’s industrial zone. Michael Allen, the city’s community development director, estimates it would have created about 50 permanent jobs and generated roughly $3.7 million in annual revenue for the city.

Data centers have been part of the urban landscape for decades, but the new hyperscale facilities designed for the artificial intelligence revolution consume far more power than earlier versions. They also need eye-popping quantities of water for cooling — upward of half a million gallons a day or more. Such data centers, which can dwarf warehouse distribution facilities, draw the most public scrutiny — even when developers reduce water and electricity use.

The contours of data center politics vary little from place to place: Opponents raise concerns about rising utility fees, proximity to homes, noise, applicant secrecy, fire safety, and the extraordinary pace of a gold rush fueled by generative AI. In California, these showdowns are complicated by the state’s gnarly water governance system, chronic drought conditions, and its role as the center of the tech industry universe.

Legislative efforts to impose stricter rules on such projects have mostly stalled, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has sought to remove or mitigate regulatory roadblocks. The Trump administration has also threatened to withhold funding from states that block AI-related infrastructure.

Yet the question orbiting this raucous fight is whether cities or states can site and zone these projects in ways that address resident concerns, as is done with other noxious but economically vital industrial land uses like waste management plants.

“I think part of the problem has been a lack of information and communities just feeling besieged,” observes Irina Raicu, an Internet ethics program director at Santa Clara University and the co-author of a new study on water availability and data center regulation. “How do data centers compare to certain agricultural uses or with other things that might be more problematic? There are some real trade-offs involved here that are not easy to make.”

“Data centers are part of our new economy,” San José Council Member David Cohen, whose district is seeing numerous such projects, said in a recent podcast. “We may or may not like the rapid growth of AI and AI utilization, but there is a need for data centers to be built based on where the economy is going. And the real question I’ve always asked is, ‘What is the best way to do it, and where should we do it if they’re done right?’”

Francisco Leal, an organizer with an Imperial residents’ group, says he found out about a $10 billion data center that would have sat adjacent to his backyard through the city of Imperial’s Facebook page last November. “We just started organizing and asking questions,” says Leal, who has lived in the community for 20 years.

By mid-December, the Imperial County planning commission found itself sitting through a four-hour listening session on a proposed lost merger tied to the project. The applicant wanted to consolidate several parcels of land, with exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The county board of supervisors eventually approved the merger, but then decided to create (and extend) a temporary moratorium on new data centers.

Both the Sierra Club and the city sued the county and the developer, alleging that the county prematurely greenlit segments of the project. The developer also sued the city, alleging “administrative obstruction and targeted retaliation,” and sought a temporary restraining order against the county’s moratorium. The cases are ongoing.

“Why wasn’t the community involved? Why CEQA is not being required?” asks Leal. “That’s all we were asking [for] since the beginning, but we just kept getting negatives.”

His group obtained internal documents through a public records request showing that county officials had quietly assessed the plan for fire risks, such as the proximity of a proposed grid storage facility with large-scale lithium-ion batteries, to homes and rail lines. “We know how dangerous lithium-based batteries are,” Leal says, citing a San Diego-area lithium-ion battery fire from 2024. “If these catch on fire, they actually explode like a bomb.” 

Information gaps like this can serve as an accelerant to the backlash. Some project proposals lack key details, hide centers within a larger project, or describe them using different labels. “Even as an educated person, I failed to recognize how the data center was buried so deep [in the municipal utility proposal],” says Dr. Frank Figueroa, Coachella’s mayor. “While the city did not approve a data center in the first approval, it was well on track to come to council in the future were it not for residents and community ringing the alarm.”

While the El Segundo developer that abruptly withdrew its application had provided a fleshed-out proposal and an updated environmental impact assessment, the city’s community development director says that narratives about data centers can take hold absent solid factual information. The site is already home to several data centers, and the analysis confirmed no significant impacts on homes and other sensitive areas, which are not in the immediate vicinity.

For its part, San José is working on a set of environmental and public consultation data center standards that exceed statewide regulations to help dispel suspicions about insider deals. “It was really important for us to get in writing what it is that we expect from data centers as they’re getting built,” Cohen said.

Indeed, newer centers generally require less water and power thanks to on-site generators, clean energy, recycled water, and other technological advancements. San José plans to require developers to pay for energy infrastructure, which Cohen argues will prevent costs from being passed on to utility customers.

It remains to be seen whether these actions will allay concerns over rising utility bills or missed climate targets. “California is trying to reach its clean energy goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045,” says Julia Dowell, Sierra Club California senior campaign organizer. “We really have to think about how are we going to meet this increased demand with clean energy and not just exacerbate our reliance on fossil fuels and gas plants.”

The most glaring data vacuum in these fights has to do with water. Iris Stewart-Frey, a water and climate expert and the lead author of the Santa Clara University report, argues that the state needs to close gaps in its CEQA processes. “There has to be a state context in which there is greater guidance [and] also more systematic thinking about data centers within California and its interconnected water system,” she says, “but then there also needs to be local determination for these communities to be able to weigh the pros and the cons.”

She also notes that there’s no global tally of the state’s fluctuating water resources. “That type of full-on accounting would be ideal to understand the impact of hyperscale data centers,” she says, “but it is something that is not available because groundwater withdrawals until very recently have not been metered at all.”

The report calls for full transparency about water requirements and more site-specific evaluations, such as the impact on water basins serving socially and environmentally vulnerable areas and locating hyperscale centers in areas with the necessary resources.

Scholars Stewart-Frey and Raicu add that more information can help improve public trust. They point to an approved development in Gilroy. “The data center in Gilroy actually went through a full environmental impact report, and that also helped to bring in at least some features that will make it more sustainable, like recycled water and the company paying for some of that infrastructure,” says Stewart-Frey.

In fact, Raicu notes that some large tech companies have begun releasing more detailed information about their data center water and energy consumption levels amid the national backlash. “That is something that we and many other researchers have been asking for years,” she says, “and it’s because of the pressure coming from the public, not from the government.”

States like California, she argues, should create a more focused regulatory approach because none of the underlying forces driving data center construction are going away. “I think the public debate has gotten loud enough that it’s going to be hard to ignore,” says Stewart-Frey. “So hopefully that will push [the thinking about data centers] and develop some of the regulations and policies that are needed at the state and federal level.”

Oakley’s Meadows notes that these projects are serving a global need for what is becoming a fixture in our digital lives. Some developers have sought out cities with fallow industrial lands or vacant light industrial buildings that have long ceased to generate property tax revenues or jobs. His concern is that developers will look elsewhere if they can’t build.

“We’re not a big city. We have 47,000 people, but we have no jobs,” Meadows says. The proposal for the 160-acre parcel “will provide regionally like 3,500 permanent jobs and 3,700 construction-related jobs. So, it’s a lot of work for people.”

Monterey Park’s Mayor Lo agrees to a point. “On the one hand, cities are under pressure because we have a responsibility to not leave things blighted and do things for the local economy, raise revenue. But again, the question is, is the data center the best use of that land?”