The debate over data centers has found its way into Los Angeles County’s election season, where for months, even the mention of data center in public forums in some local cities has drawn keen attention in the run-up to November.
In cities such as Alhambra and Monterey Park, the local fate of centers — the giant warehouses, built to power the nation’s artificial intelligence boom, and their kin, battery energy storage systems (BESS) — has manifested itself in ballot measures and candidate talking points, as towns debate whether such hubs should be built.
In most cases, the centers don’t exist at all, and in a handful they’ve been proposed. But in L.A. County, like the rest of the nation, they’ve often become a symbol of pushback in a nation grappling with high costs and the relentless drive of technology companies seeking to build an AI infrastructure.
Case in point: Alhambra.
In July, the City Council voted to place Measure DB on the Nov. 3 ballot, giving residents the chance to codify an existing city ban that has been an ordinance in the city.
“While a Data Center ban already exists by ordinance, this measure lets Alhambra voters decide whether to make that ban permanent and subject to voter approval to change” City Manager City Manager Jessica Binnquist said back in September announcement, after the council approved the ballot measure.
Many residents had reportedly emailed the city about wanting data center protections, leading to the June 22 ordinance.
And, like many cities, the action for the ban came amid a broader discussion on responsible development and long-term investments in schools, infrastructure, public spaces and environmental safety.
If the proposed Alhambra measure sounds familiar, it’s because neighboring Monterey Park has become the impetus for voter action on data centers after its voters approved a pioneering ban in June. The momentum has carried over, becoming a template for this November’s ballot action on the centers, proponents said.
In Monterey Park, developer HMC StratCap had proposed a center before a months-long grassroots campaign and various city ordinances brought the project to a halt, first with a city council moratorium and then a vote of the people.
In the wake of the win, an array of local community organizers and leaders involved in supporting the measure are running for office this November, not just in Monterey Park but in neighboring cities.
- Also see: In Monterey Park, 2 candidates vie for a seat in aftermath of trailblazing data center ban
In Monterey Park and Alhambra, the anti-data center movement led Steven Kung and Amy J. Wong – organizers from No Data Center Monterey Park and SGV Progressive Action – to run for their respective city council seats.
Leveraging their Monterey Park success, Wong and others from SGV Progressive Action have advocated for other cities to follow suit: promote a voter-ballot based ban, which is harder to overturn than a council ordinance banning the facilities city-wide. Beyond advocating for ordinances in Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park, Wong’s advocacy could lead to Alhambra being the second city in the county to ban data centers city-wide through public vote with its Measure DB.
Wong, who is running against Ron Sahu for an Alhambra seat, co-founded SGV Progressive Action, helped establish Monterey Park’s data center ballot initiative and campaigned for the same action in other San Gabriel Valley cities, including Alhambra.
It’s become part of her pitch as she battles it out with Sahu over quality-of-life and development issues. Sahu also supports the ban.
It’s not just them.
Leslie Garcia, an air quality instrument specialist with the South Coast Air Quality Management District running for West Covina City Council District 2, became involved with the No Data Center San Gabriel Valley coalition, which has fueled her run for office.
“I started becoming more involved with the No Data Center coalition, and as we’re continuing to do our work against the City of Industry, that’s when people who were running for positions in Covina started to speak up about the battery energy storage system,” Garcia said.
In June, the Covina Planning Commission rejected energy developer RWE’s controversial Covina Reliability Project, a BESS facility, citing several inconsistencies in the project. And, in September, West Covina Council unanimously approved a resolution opposing large-scale data centers and BESS facilities from being built in the city.
Locally, many see BESS facilities — which harness electrical energy — as a precursor to data centers.
In February, the City of Industry’s City Council unanimously approved energy utility developer AYPA Power’s application to begin developing the Marici Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Facility along Gale Avenue. The project’s approval followed previous concerns at a Jan. 27 planning commission meeting that the proposed facility would lead to a future data center, which AYPA and the city have denied.
Stefanie Leilua decided to run for council in Walnut because “when one city gets an approval, it’s gonna affect two to three cities, no matter what, because of how we’re lined up.”
“Look at the La Verne fire that happened,” pointing to the Metropolitan Water District BESS fire that led to a four-day evacuation in late September.
The fire involved two 250-kilowatt battery units housed in an indoor-outdoor facility to support a 2-megawatt solar farm. By comparison, the City of Industry’s Marici BESS facility is to be approximately 400 megawatts.
“It wasn’t even as big, but everybody had to end up staying indoors because of the chemical pollution that was coming out of the battery center,” Leilua said.
Garcia noted the nexus between local cities.
“I went to go help them out since they’re our sister city,” Garcia continued. “In the San Gabriel Valley, this feels like the first time we have a really large progressive movement united by the fact that we don’t want data centers … If we get it done here, in this district, it would help working-class families all across the board.”
Beyond council seats, some No Data Center San Gabriel Valley members are running for local school boards.
- Also see: City of Industry council approves project to develop battery storage hub, despite calls to delay
Falynn Love Thompson, running for one Rowland Unified School District Board seat in Trustee Area 5, said residents living in unincorporated areas look to school boards to have “powerful statements in places like City of Industry, because we are their neighbors.”
It was the Bassett Unified School District’ board of education that unanimously voted on a resolution opposing the City of Industry’s Dec. 17 resolution, allowing data centers to exist city-wide.
RUSD covers Rowland Heights, portions of Walnut, La Puente, City of Industry and West Covina and the unincorporated community of South San Jose Hills. Samuel Brown Vazquez is running for Bassett Unified School District, which covers the unincorporated community of Bassett, portions of the unincorporated West Puente Valley and Avocado Heights and portions of La Puente, Baldwin Park, West Covina and City of Industry.
RUSD’s April 9 resolution opposes City of Industry Zoning Code Amendment No. 25-02 and related high-intensity industrial development, including data centers and the Marci project.
While there are no data centers within county unincorporated areas, about 74 data centers are operating within Los Angeles County, according to Department of Regional Planning documents. County unincorporated areas contain about 1 million of the 10 million county residents.
Nationally, attitudes around data centers are largely negative, with 7 in 10 Americans being against the technology, according to Gallup, with 48% strongly opposed; and, the issue extends past party lines.
Most recently, New York enacted a one-year state moratorium on hyperscale data centers.
As in Monterey Park, concerns about their impact on the environment, the amount of water they use to cool, the amount of energy they need to operate, and their potential costs to consumers have spurred critics.
It’s playing out in other parts of the county, not just in the San Gabriel Valley.
In El Segundo, where in July, a developer recently withdrew a proposal to build a massive data center after hearing droves of residents oppose the project. The real estate development firm Eight Form applied to demolish the existing Hyatt Place hotel, 750 N. Nash St., and build a five-story, nearly 240,000 square-foot data center in its place.
The data center would have housed computer servers supporting equipment for private clients, such as web hosting, network storage and application processing, according to the project proposal. It would have reached up to 169 feet in the sky, and be accompanied by a high-voltage electrical substation to power the center.
In Huntington Park, on Oct. 13, Council voted 4–0 to approve a temporary 45-day moratorium on new data centers and the expansion of existing facilities; that same day, community members rallied to support the moratorium.
District 4 Supervisor Janice Hanh oversees the unincorporated area directly below Huntington Park. District 2 Supervisor Holly Mitchell oversees nearby unincorporated territories.
In a statement, Hahn wrote, “I understand people’s concerns about large scale data center development. They put a strain on utilities, use a massive amount of water, and impact the nearby neighborhoods. Under our current land use code, large scale data centers are not permitted in any part of unincorporated Los Angeles County.”
The snowballing opposition to data centers in communities across the United States has transformed the midterm election landscape.
As the Associated Press noted in its national reporting, the push has united conservative ranching and farming communities with left-leaning environmental advocacy groups, who share a combined concern about drought-stricken waterways, pollution in food-growing areas and shrinking farmland.
In New Mexico, where Oracle and OpenAI are building Project Jupiter, a $165 billion data center complex planned near the Mexican border, concerns over dwindling water supplies are mounting.
But data centers have their supporters, from local governments to the federal government.
President Donald Trump has continued to defend data centers, even as elected leaders Republican and Democratic veer away from them.
Trump said in August that if he were a mayor or a governor with a chance to land a big data center, “I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”
As CalMatters has reported, although California lawmakers recently passed a suite of laws intended to bring transparency to the development of new data centers, local communities across the state are signaling that disclosure isn’t enough.
The outlet reported that California currently ranks third among U.S. states in overall data center density, according to independent trackers like the US Data Center Map, with the state home to 366 of such facilities that are either fully operational, under construction, or moving through the planning process.
In 2024, Prime Data Center, a 33-megawatt, three-story, 242,495-square-foot facility, opened in Vernon, just southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Officials there have touted the city’s unique position to accommodate data centers because it owns and operates its own public utility, has a small residential population and has a history built on business.
Trump also acknowledged, however, that data centers need “a little public relations help.”
The Republican president is a leading champion for the industry, seeing it as critical to winning the artificial intelligence race against China.
His administration is pushing to help tech giants build and connect data centers to power plants and high-voltage power lines and convert Cold War-era uranium enrichment plants into data center and power plant complexes.
In L.A. County, permanent county-wide protections against data centers don’t yet exist.
County residents in L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis’s supervisorial district have raised concerns with her office, citing the potential for neighboring cities outside of their elected representation passing data center or BESS facility projects that could negatively impact their health and utility rates.
In April, Solis introduced a county-wide study on data centers, with the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning imposing a moratorium in September.
But a day before the Board of Supervisors considered Solis’s item on a permanent county-wide data center prohibition in October, her office pulled the item. Organizers cited the prospect of a failed supervisorial vote on the subject could signal to Department of Regional Planning officials that data centers are not a pressing issue, leading to repealed protection.
City of Industry resident Andrew Chen recently created one-click email templates for people to send public comments to the Board of Supervisors. They produced almost 1,200 public comments on the issue of data centers. Usually, the average for a single topic is 30 to 50 comments, Chen added.
“These small actions add up to big change, and so that’s the key,” said Chen, the volunteer Director of Outreach and Fundraising for the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association, which has been battling the City of Industry since March over the Marici BESS facility project Council approved in February.
“When we start draining five million gallons of water per day, you bet Santa Monica is not going to have any water either,” Chen said. “So it’s also their fight, right?”
The Associated Press and CalMatters contributed to this report.
Joshua Silla is a correspondent with the Southern California News Group.