Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...A massive Amazon data center already being built on Gilroy’s eastern edge has become a flashpoint over how much say residents get before Silicon Valley’s next wave of tech infrastructure arrives in their backyards.
The project, expected to begin operating by the end of the year, never went before the Gilroy City Council because the land had already been zoned for heavy industrial use. But many residents say they learned about the data center only after construction began.
Amazon and city officials, however, say the company followed the rules and has gone above and beyond to offset the project’s water and energy impacts.
“We believe we built a solution that fits the community,” said Roger Wehner, vice president of Economic Development at Amazon Web Services, at a meeting Wednesday night to discuss its plans for the data center. “We’ve made every effort to not just meet but exceed the requirements about transparency, and I think tonight is an example of that.”
Data centers have faced a growing backlash around the country as residents complain about the tech facilities’ higher electricity demand, strain on local utilities and water supplies, and a lack of transparency from the companies that build them.
Gilroy’s data center project is currently being built on a 56-acre parcel of formerly agricultural land and includes two data center buildings that will be 218,000 square feet — each nearly the size of four football fields.
Data centers house the hardware where companies store and process data, enabling everything from online shopping to AI. The AI boom has led to a burgeoning demand for the centers, since training and running AI models requires a great deal of data and computational power.
All those computers need a great deal of energy and – since computers run best when they are cool – often use large supplies of water to cool down facilities. In other states, this has strained electricity grids, stressed water supplies and caused pollution and noise issues from generators.
The Gilroy project has been in development for years. Amazon purchased the property in 2020, began the environmental review process in 2022 and broke ground in December 2025. According to Amazon spokesperson Adrienne Talbot, the data center should be operational by the end of the year.
Wednesday evening, an open house hosted by Amazon to explain its efforts to offset the negative impacts of its project became a site of protest. The Gilroy High School cafeteria filled up with brightly colored informational booths with Amazon logos as dozens moved around the room asking questions and raising concerns about the project. Toward the front of the room, a group of protesters chanted over the low rumble of the crowd, carrying signs that said “NO DATA CENTERS IN GILROY.”
The scene illustrated an ongoing tension between some residents of Gilroy and one of the world’s most valuable companies.
“It was very sneaky,” said Annabelle Barbazette, 21, a Gilroy resident who protested with others at the event on Wednesday, noting her concerns about the transparency of the process. “We don’t trust Amazon. I really think they’re taking advantage of Gilroy.”
At the event, several volunteers collected signatures to change the city code that allowed the project to be approved with only staff review and require a public hearing and additional environmental review for data centers.
The petition mirrored other California communities that have sought to slow down or stop data centers in their cities. Oakley instituted a moratorium on data centers last month that it recently extended into next year, and the southern California city of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to ban data centers.
City officials and Amazon executives both assured residents that their process was transparent, and did not express an appetite to change zoning law. They pointed to media reports on the upcoming data center that came out years ago and to websites that they built to outline the process and answer potential questions on the project.
While City Administrator Matt Morley said, “There’s always a chance to revisit the decision tree,” he asserted that the city had been transparent and noted that the process of creating the zoning laws is open to the public. He also maintained that it was difficult to get companies to invest with a “moving target” of changing regulation. “There’s nothing wrong with the decision process,” he said.
For its part, Amazon assured that it has gone beyond what is required to address environmental concerns, saying that the project would bring 90 jobs to the site, and that the company was working on multiple efforts to decrease water use and donate to local community organizations.
The company is in talks with Silicon Valley Clean Energy to use 100% renewable energy to power the site and is building energy infrastructure, emergency generators, and battery storage on site to minimize strain on the grid. (A spokesperson from Silicon Valley Clean Energy confirmed that talks were in motion and that they had the energy supply to meet the demand of the new data center.)
For water, Amazon plans to expand existing infrastructure so that it can use reclaimed water for cooling. However, this will not take place until the second phase of the project, which will be built “by 2030,” according to Amazon. The site would use a combined 4 million gallons a year just for cooling, according to Amazon — about as much water as 43 households, based on a Mercury News calculation using local water use estimates.
While city officials noted that the expansion of the infrastructure could benefit future businesses, they shared the concern that the project would be using potable water and urged Amazon to move forward quickly toward reclaimed water.
Iris Stewart-Frey, a professor of water resources at Santa Clara University, published a study on the intersection of water use and data centers in California including the one in Gilroy. She called the Gilroy process “the most transparent and public in terms of making documents available” out of the data centers she tracked, and noted that it was “great” that the project planned to use reclaimed water. “That doesn’t mean that everything is good and well.”
She argued that the public needed a more definite timeline on the use of reclaimed water, and noted that “water is a scarce commodity in California,” pointing out the historical issues with drought as well as diminishing snowpack in a changing climate.
While California has had small data centers for decades, large data centers like the one in Gilroy are “unexplored territory.” She argued that there needs to be clearer laws at the state level, and an even more heightened level of transparency from both data center builders and city planners to allay fears and allow communities to weigh the costs and benefits of projects.
“There are benefits in terms of this expanded computing, but the question is really where should they be located, and do the people have a full picture on the environmental and community impact to make an informed decision,” she said. “No community wants to be the guinea pig.”