In May 2025, the Hayward Planning Commission, without a City Council vote, approved a “hyperscale” data center by STACK Infrastructure — a 310,000-square-foot facility with an electrical capacity equivalent to providing power to approximately 76,000 homes simultaneously. Concerns about oversight for such large projects soon followed.
Between the rapid deployment of data center infrastructure and community pushback, Bay Area cities are rushing to establish new guidelines to regulate the resource-intensive facilities while balancing the importance of raising revenue for strained city budgets and concerns about the resource demands of the powerful tech infrastructure. Several of the region’s cities have sought to slow or outright stop their development.
“While I understand the economic arguments often made for these facilities, the environmental costs, particularly in California’s current climate reality, are too significant to ignore,” Hayward resident Stephanie VanGilder wrote to the California Energy Commission in June. “In a region already facing chronic drought, shrinking snowpack, and increasingly unpredictable water availability, allocating scarce water resources to a private data center is irresponsible.”…