The politics have followed quickly.
Protesters dressed as cardboard robots chanted outside Oakland City Hall last month, according to Al Jazeera, in a demonstration against new data centres whose central complaint was the strain on the energy grid. The result, they argued, would be environmental harm and higher electricity bills for local households. "Power prices have gone up so much in Oakland that some people are thinking of shutting off their power," Carlos Gutierrez of the environmental justice group Communities for a Better Environment told the outlet, adding that the city was planning to provide power to a data centre instead.
The backlash is national in scope but sharpest in the San Francisco Bay Area, the region Al Jazeera describes as the heart of the artificial intelligence boom and home to Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. More than 3,000 data centres already operate in the United States, with more than 1,500 others in development, according to Pew Research Center figures cited in the report. The centres require round-the-clock power and large supplies of water for cooling, and the article notes they are associated with increases in land surface temperatures of as much as 9 degrees Celsius.
The politics have followed quickly. In the final two months before Tuesday's midterms, at least seven Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Richmond, passed temporary moratoriums on data centre construction; Oakland's followed days of protest on 6 October. The issue has become a wedge in local races, most closely watched being the contest to succeed Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring after 39 years in the House. San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who helped pass the city's moratorium, has pledged to seek a nationwide pause until AI regulation is in place, while state Senator Scott Wiener opposes any ban, telling Mission Local that a blanket moratorium could undermine AI regulation. A University of Southern California poll in mid-October put Wiener ahead of Chan by 47 per cent to 41.
Analyst Shum Preston told Al Jazeera that data centre opposition "unifies the US public like no other", citing an October CNBC poll finding 63 per cent of registered voters opposed construction within 16 kilometres of their homes. He suggested developers have held back from fighting the bans before an election, and that hearings will become more contentious once the 45-day moratoriums lapse. The pauses themselves face practical limits: San Francisco's planning code still defines data centres as "internet service exchanges", language written in 2001, which Supervisor Shamann Walton said makes them hard to count and monitor. Roger Lin of the Center for Biological Diversity argued that 45 days is hardly enough to document impacts and frame regulations, and that non-disclosure agreements can leave even local air quality boards uninformed.
Industry supporters point to Anthropic's planned initial public offering, likely to raise billions, as evidence of a flourishing sector with downstream benefits. Critics counter that the growth may not spread evenly, in a city already facing some of the country's fastest-rising rents. One resident at a San Francisco hearing put it bluntly, telling supervisors: "This city is less for humans and more for robots and billionaires."
What remains unconfirmed is the scale of the problem the moratoriums are meant to address. The report offers no city-level count of data centres, no estimate of their draw on Bay Area power or water, and no detail on which facilities prompted the Oakland dispute. Whether the bans survive their expiry, and whether the issue carries weight beyond Tuesday's vote, will depend on hearings not yet held.
