Working class communities are pushing back against the rapid expansion of AI data centers, rejecting the premise that they are a necessary cost of innovation and the practice of corporations making decisions about communities, especially while they drain local resources and deliver little benefit to the people who actually live there.
Unlike actual public infrastructure, data centers aren’t built to meet a community need or for the public good. They are being built to generate profits for some of the richest corporations in the world who have been investing heavily in AI for no other reason than because they expect to see huge financial returns. Local governments are promised economic benefits through tax revenues or job growth, but data centers are highly automated and employ relatively few actual workers all while using enormous amounts of land, electricity, and public infrastructure.
In our area, here are ways everyday people are fighting back:
- In Pittsburg, more than 300 residents packed a City Council meeting in June to oppose the proposed 300,000-square-foot AI data center planned at the former Delta View Golf Course. They raised concerns, largely about the long-term impacts on water and power infrastructure. The opposition was strong enough to push the city into launching community engagement workshops on data center development. But organizers aren’t ceding the narrative, and have started holding weekly organizing meetings, educating neighbors about the impacts of the project while building support for a moratorium on future data center construction.
- In Gilroy, residents formed the Stop Gilroy Data Center campaign after learning that an Amazon Web Services data center was already under construction. The decision to plant a data center there was done without opportunity for the community to weigh in before the project was approved. Gilroy’s economy is deeply rooted in agriculture, and residents are raising alarms about the increased pressure data centers will place on already strained water and electricity resources through petitions, community forums, and a sustained public pressure campaign aimed at stopping future expansion.
- In Daly City, the historic Cow Palace was eyed as a potential “edge” data center by Global Stack LLC, but community organizing led the Cow Palace Board of Directors to suspend any considerations of the concept indefinitely.
This organizing shows that everyday people are refusing to accept that AI data centers and corporate expansion is inevitable. And it’s working -- in Southern California, Monterey Park overwhelmingly voted to permanently ban data centers this June, and New York imposed the first statewide data center moratorium. Working class people are demanding the basic democratic principle that decisions about land use, water and energy consumption, environmental impacts, and public resources should be made by the communities themselves, not by the profit motive of unelected CEOs and their investors.
