The Facts

Supervisor Shamann Walton plans to introduce a 45-day moratorium on data centers, which could be extended to two years. No new data centers are currently being proposed in San Francisco, so the moratorium will have no ultimate effect.

The Context

For those unfamiliar with data centers: they are warehouses full of computers that run the internet. Every news article, every Instagram post, and every email moves through and ultimately ends up in a data center. Data centers power our modern world.

There are currently seven data center sites inside city limits, with all but one open for over a decade.

The national political dust-up over data centers is around their purported water use, but this is based on bad data. Brian Potter at Construction Physics explains why the popular narrative is wrong and that data centers use approximately 275 million gallons per day (by contrast, almond farming uses 4.4 billion gallons per day). San Francisco’s newest data center advertises water-free cooling.

Similarly, data centers across the United States collectively use less than 5% of all power. For something so absolutely instrumental every aspect of our daily lives, that hardly seems worth any concern at all. And many new data centers are building power production on-site or are powered with 100% renewable energy.

The GrowSF Take

Walton is importing a national political panic into San Francisco land-use policy. San Francisco has power problems, yes, but that's because PG&E can't keep their lines and transformers in good shape. And several of the data centers already in San Francisco already use 100% renewable power. We have no water problems to speak of.

This is nothing more than political signaling.