San Francisco’s board of supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to impose a 45-day moratorium on new data centers, a pause that can be extended up to 22 months. Despite San Francisco being the home of AI development in the United States, one city official said of data centers, “We need to know what these impacts are. Until we know what that is, it needs to stop.”
Bloomberg reports that the measure halts new projects while city planning officials study their effects on energy, water, air quality, land use and surrounding communities. A hearing on those findings is due by November, according to Mission Local, which reported on the vote.
“We need to know what these impacts are. Until we know what that is, it needs to stop,” Supervisor Shamann Walton said.
San Francisco is home to AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic, but the city doesn’t actually know how many data centers it already hosts. Bloomberg found no comprehensive tally. The San Francisco Standard counts six sites.
Two projects are now on hold because of the freeze. One is NOVVA’s facility at 400 Paul Avenue in Bayview, which currently draws 9 megawatts of power but had applied to expand to 36 megawatts. The other is a 49.5 megawatt data center proposed for the Dogpatch waterfront, which was in permit discussions with Mayor Daniel Lurie’s (D) policy staff as recently as August, the Standard reported. Sponsors of the Dogpatch project have argued that Bayview-Hunters Point, where it would be built, is already overburdened by air pollution.
Breitbart News previously reported that $68 billion in data center projects have been delayed over the past three months:
The projects, tracked by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence company 10a Labs, made up more than half of all new large-scale developments the group monitored during that period. Data Center Watch’s lead analyst, Miquel Vila, said opposition to the industry is broadening. “New groups continue to emerge, opposition is appearing across a wide range of states and jurisdictions, and online petition signatures continue to grow,” he said.
The numbers back that up. Data Center Watch counted 843 opposition groups spread across 49 states; Hawaii is the only state without one. About 30 statehouses have introduced or adopted rules covering data center siting, electricity use or water consumption. In Tennessee, a petition against a single data center project drew more than 500,000 signatures on Change.org, more than a third of all signatures collected on the platform that quarter, according to Data Center Watch.
AI data centers and the integration of this technology is changing the political landscape. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.