San Francisco on Tuesday became the first county in the Bay Area to enact a temporary moratorium on the construction of new data centers.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously at its regular meeting to approve a 45-day urgency ordinance that took effect immediately.
The moratorium calls for a halt to the approval of permit applications to expand an existing data center or build a new one, which house the computing hardware and infrastructure needed to power newly developed artificial intelligence tools.
Newer data centers are also referred to as AI data centers and are similar to data centers of the past that house servers, storage systems, and networking equipment, according to IBM.
But the computing demands of AI and generative AI that produce text and images require more equipment that also uses more power and requires a source of water to cool overheating servers and other components.
The excessive energy and water use, combined with noise complaints and water supply contamination, prompted the moratorium to be proposed by District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton.
“During this period, we will be looking at issues including energy, water, air quality, land use, and community impacts, while working towards stronger protections and meaningful community input, as well as ‘data center’ definition that is clear to everyone,” he said at the board meeting.
Over a dozen commenters spoke in support of the moratorium when the ordinance was introduced at the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting on Monday.
Walton said at Tuesday’s meeting that the moratorium would give the city the opportunity to better understand the environmental and local impacts data centers create.
“We are seeing data centers pop up near residential communities all across the United States, and we have seen the impacts from polluting the water supply, to the noise these facilities bring to neighborhoods closest to them,” Walton said at the committee meeting.
He said there had been no community input or transparency when a data center was recently approved on Paul Avenue, in his district, which includes Bayview-Hunters Point. He said the approval was given in 2016 under outdated planning conditions that needed to be updated.
Walton said the number of data centers in the city was unknown, partially because the city lacked a comprehensive definition of what they were, something he said the moratorium would address by giving the board time to draft long-term regulations. The city’s Planning Department currently categorizes them as an “internet service exchange,” which was previously understood to be any component that facilitated the networking of computer systems.
But he said existing data centers in the city were concentrated in Bayview-Hunters Point and the South of Market neighborhood, which Walton said have historically taken on a disproportionate amount of the city’s industrial pollution.
The ordinance authored by Walton uses the definition used by U.S. Senator Alex Padilla in legislation he wrote seeking greater federal regulation of data centers, which defines them as “a facility, or part of a facility, that houses computing infrastructure, including graphics and central processing units, servers, storage devices, networking equipment, and associated power and cooling systems, for the primary purpose of processing, storing, or distributing electronic data.”
Supervisor Matt Dorsey proposed clarifying amendments that stipulated that the moratorium does not apply to businesses that have server rooms dedicated to onsite operations, rather than those that serve offsite customers’ data needs.