San Jose is pushing ahead to create standards for data centers amid community angst around health and environmental impacts — though advocates said it’s too soon to tell whether these standards will protect residents or fast track approvals.
At the Rules and Open Government Committee meeting last week, Councilmembers David Cohen, Rosemary Kamei, Bien Doan, Domingo Candelas and Vice Mayor Pam Foley unanimously voted to have the city manager come up with uniform guidelines for data centers. These standards would help mitigate environmental impacts, provide a process for community engagement and support cleaner infrastructure, according to the memo written by Mayor Matt Mahan and Councilmembers Peter Ortiz, Candelas and Cohen.
The goal of creating these standards isn’t to simply regulate data centers, but to create a flexible framework to support economic growth and responsible development, the memo states. The City Manager’s Office will return with these standards to the full City Council in December.
“I think this is important, that we as a city have an opportunity to be at the forefront of this, given the concerns that we’re hearing,” Candelas said at the meeting.
Dash Leeds, conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter, said the city is racing toward developing data centers before seeking meaningful input from residents.
“We are concerned that these standards, if left up to the city, could merely streamline the data center approval process without creating robust protections,” Leeds told San José Spotlight. “The city should restore the trust it has broken by pausing its data center rush and allowing the community to write the standards that should be meant to protect us.”
San Jose has roughly 20 data centers in operation, with more to come. Six more data centers are under construction, and five are in the entitlement review process to obtain city approvals before beginning construction, according to Erica Garaffo, assistant to the city manager.
Deputy City Manager Manuel Pineda said the city doesn’t know which data centers are going to be used for artificial intelligence. At no point in the process is the city aware of what the data centers will be used for unless the developer discloses it, he said.
“When a data center comes in, they don’t discuss with us whether there’s going to be a AI data center or a different type of data center,” Pineda told San José Spotlight. “Obviously, data centers are used for a lot of things — banking, medical and many other things — but that’s not something that they disclose to us.”
While many data centers use water to cool sensitive electronic equipment, AI-focused data centers consume significantly more energy and water, and can cause more harm to the environment and public health.
As the water evaporates, data centers produce a discharge of dissolved metals and chemicals that can affect local drinking water and rivers if not properly treated. In places like Morgan and Newton counties in Georgia, residents’ water became discolored after the construction of Meta’s data centers.
Pineda said the city will host in-person community meetings before finalizing the standards.
“I can’t tell you what the outreach will be just yet, but we’ll try to reach as many people as we can for individual projects,” Pineda told San José Spotlight.
Advocates don’t trust the city to come up with these standards unilaterally. They have pushed for more transparency and information regarding AI data centers in the pipeline, and have called for a pause on approving more data centers before the impacts have been studied and standards have been set.
Cohen opposed pausing development and said data centers take years to come online.
“They’re not something where a proposal comes forward and six months later there’s a groundbreaking,” Cohen said at the meeting. “The idea that we would somehow pause the process of working with people who are considering projects just doesn’t necessarily make sense from a development and economic development standpoint.”
Pineda said the city will create a website where people can see the current and proposed projects and where they will be located, as well as where they are in the process.
“It’s a good step so far, but (we) definitely just got to see what more they’ll do, and see if it’s just something that they’re just checking the box,” Marcos Espinoza, president of Alviso in Action, told San José Spotlight.
Last July, San Jose announced a partnership with PG&E that aims to make it easier to develop data centers and other large-scale energy use projects in the city.
Under the agreement, PG&E is tasked with providing power and making grid improvements for 12 projects by 2030. In addition, the utility will also fund six city staff positions who will coordinate and streamline projects as they move through the approval and construction process.
“It’s hard to trust without details, and we haven’t been provided any concrete details,” Ellina Yin, who leads the civic engagement nonprofit Dreaming Collaborative, told San José Spotlight. “They’re not being transparent of what type of data centers they’re building, and actually, how much different they are than traditional data centers.”
Contact Joyce Chu at joyce@sanjosespotlight.com or @joyce_speaks on X.
This story originally appeared in San José Spotlight.