Santa Clara is home to some of the largest tech companies in the world: Nvidia, Intel and AMD, so it is no wonder the city is embracing the data center boom.<\/p>\n
The south San Francisco Bay Area town has 58 data centers, the densest cluster on the West Coast, and is spending $459 million to double its power grid so it can build more. Almost all lie within the limits of the city and its neighbor, Mountain View.<\/p>\n
But Santa Clara residents reap rewards, as local utility company Silicon Valley Power \u2014 owned by the City of Santa Clara \u2014 charges 18.2 cents a kilowatt-hour, 57% less \u00a0than the 42.2 cents Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the private utility serving most of Northern California, charges.<\/p>\n
An aerial view of Nvidia Headquarters is seen in Santa Clara, California, on June 2, 2026. Anadolu via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Stack Infrastructure\u2019s SVY02A data center project is seen in Santa Clara, California, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. Stack Infrastructure, a unit of Blue Owl Capital Inc., owns the 48 megawatt data center that is vacant while the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, upgrades its capacity, a process expected to take until 2028. Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Santa Clara also collects an estimated $29.5 million a year from the server farms that ring its apartment blocks, which gets spent on police, parks, libraries and other resident services.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur bills are about $130 for the electricity, the garbage and the water,\u201d a resident at Santa Clara Square, an apartment complex surrounded by data centers, told the Post.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they are gonna build more data centers, then I would want to see \u2026 a decrease in rent, or the electricity bills.<\/p>\n
The resident said she has lived at the Square for nearly five years and didn\u2019t realize how many data centers surrounded it. \u201cFor now, it doesn\u2019t bother me,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile a former Santa Clara resident told the Post their electricity bill jumped fivefold after moving away.<\/p>\n
Forty miles north, San Francisco County has 15 data centers. There, supervisors are pushing a 45-day moratorium<\/a> on new ones, citing the burden on the Bayview, a neighborhood with a long history of pollution.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to know all the impacts of having a data center in the community before we allow another to come inside of San Francisco,\u201d Supervisor Shamann Walton, who wrote the measure, said at a City Hall press conference Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n Candidate Shamann Walton, running for board of supervisors district 10, speaks to the San Francisco Chronicle during an editorial board meeting on Friday, September 21, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif. San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images<\/p>\n The two cities aren\u2019t built alike. San Francisco packs about 800,000 people into 47 square miles \u2014 roughly 18,600 people per square mile, according to the Census Bureau<\/a> \u2014 so almost any site for a data center will have homes nearby.<\/p>\n Santa Clara spreads 133,000 people across 18 square miles, about a third as dense, with a broad industrial belt of office parks and chip plants where most of the data centers cluster.<\/p>\n Santa Clara\u2019s neighboring counties, San Mateo and Alameda, currently have two data centers and 14 respectively, according to the US Data Center Map<\/a> \u00a0\u2014 and there has been local backlash against building further facilities in both.<\/p>\n Nearly seven in 10 Americans say they\u2019d oppose a data center in their community, according to a Gallup poll<\/a> in May \u2014 more than oppose nuclear power plants.<\/p>\n Demonstrators wave signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion in Imperial, California, Saturday, July 18, 2026. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n However, the very term \u201cdata center\u201d has become loaded.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are many different kinds of data centers,\u201d pointed out Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who has studied them for more than a quarter-century.<\/p>\n \u201cSmaller data centers that are properly run, that do not have their own [power] generation only have the impact of a big warehouse or an office building.\u201d<\/p>\n Koomey advises AMD on efficiency goals and receives Amazon funding for research on data-center water use.<\/p>\n Many people have also raised concerns about water use, but a May 2025 Valley Water briefing<\/a> made clear most Santa Clara data centers use recycled water \u2014 treated wastewater from showers and toilets.<\/p>\n Data center researcher Jonathan Koomey, who advises some of tech\u2019s largest companies.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not clean enough to drink. You wouldn\u2019t want people to drink it,\u201d Koomey said. \u201cBut it\u2019s perfectly fine for watering golf courses or for cooling a data center.\u201d<\/p>\n Using recycled water, he said, keeps a data center\u2019s water footprint to a minimum. But each facility handles water use differently, he added.<\/p>\n Sata Clara says those building the data centers pay their own connection costs plus a share of wider system upgrades. As an example, the city\u2019s servers need more power than the local substation can handle, so Intel is footing the whole bill to expand it \u2014 plus about $10 million in fees for the extra load, a February council report<\/a> shows.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very important for the people who are imposing costs on society to pay those costs,\u201d Koomey noted.<\/p>\n