Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Calistoga residents this week got a glimpse of one possible future for the city’s struggling fairgrounds: a data center, with a three-story parking garage and a helipad space for futuristic, not-yet-approved aircraft to go with it.
Nick Kovacevich, president of Global Stack LLC and a member of the Orange County Fair and Event Center Board, explained at the Calistoga Fairgrounds Advisory Committee meeting Thursday, June 25, the company is bringing the data center plan to often cash-strapped fairgrounds across California. The idea, he said, combines “edge computing” data centers that use about 10 megawatts of electricity annually with parking garages that would be built above the centers and feature rooftop landing spaces for electrical vertical take off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
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Fairgrounds across California could tap into the revenue gained from all three sources, Kovacevich said, keeping them financially afloat and able to provide the events and other services they’ve historically provided. Construction would be funded privately.
“A lot of fairgrounds are struggling financially, and there’s talk about selling the grounds, turning them into housing,” Kovacevich said. “And I just don’t think we have enough community spaces. I don’t want to see these community spaces disappear.”
The vision, he acknowledged, is still a ways off — in part because eVTOL aircraft are not yet approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The item was of considerable interest to the community, who generally spoke in opposition — especially to the AI-powering data center idea — or said Calistoga needed to figure out a master plan for its fairgrounds before considering such ideas. About 50 people filled the available seating in the Tucker building on the fairgrounds property by the time the meeting started at 6 p.m., leaving more than a dozen standing in the back — a crowd that continued growing as the meeting proceeded.
The U.S. backlash to data centers has grown tremendously in recent months, with Americans blaming such centers for environmental impacts, rising energy bills, added noise, air pollution and water use. Over 100 proposed moratoriums on data center construction have been proposed at “the local, county, state and national level,” according to the New York Times.
In a statement Friday, Global Stack LLC co-founder Daniel Kang said the company’s proposed data centers at the Calistoga Fairgrounds and elsewhere would be small, “self-contained modular units” deployed in mesh by design, that would use “closed-loop, zero-water cooling.” A center at the Calistoga Fairgrounds would not draw from the city’s water supply, according to Kang.
An informational sheet provided by Global Stack about the company that builds such units, MeshClusters LLC, says such “nodes” differ from standard data centers because they’re “fully enclosed modules engineered to be transported and set in place on a fairground, logistics yard or remote site without permanent construction or a dedicated water and cooling build-out. Each unit ships sealed, powers on and operates as a standalone enclosure.”
The centers would have a 10-megawatt limit representing “a fraction of a conventional hyper-scale facility, the kind that genuinely does strain grids and watersheds,” Kang wrote. (A one-year moratorium on new data centers approved by New York state lawmakers earlier this month applied to such hyper-scale data centers, defined as those using more than 20 megawatts of power, according to the New York Times.)
Kang also wrote that the purpose of adding the centers was “to keep fire, police, and emergency agencies connected and powered when the grid and the cell networks fail.”
“We are not asking Calistoga to accept anything,” Kang wrote. “We’ve offered the same concept to fairgrounds across the state because more than seventy of them — built a century ago to serve their communities — have fallen into disrepair, and we believe a circular, self-funding model can bring them back. Any site that wants to be part of that network can be. Any site that doesn’t, isn’t.”
A back-and-forth at the meeting between Calistoga residents and Kovacevich showed there was little community interest in the data center proposal. Though residents at first focused on the details of a possible project, they moved on, saying there’s a need for a master plan for the fairgrounds.
When Kovacevich was asked whether he was aware that Calistoga’s purchase of the fairgrounds from Napa County in 2024 included a contract limiting the city’s use of the property to historical uses, he said, “I think the uses that we’re talking about could fit into the historical uses,” prompting laughter from the crowd.
Napa resident Resa Jarvey — who carried a sign reading “AI will kill us all” and said her grandparents live in Calistoga — said at the meeting the fairgrounds has long been dedicated to the community and should remain a community space, “not a space that is used for billionaires to make more profit.”
Jarvey said in an interview Kovacevich’s presentation involved creating a facade of helping the community, when such a project would actually do harm. She said she opposed data centers because they serve to drain resources such as water and electricity from the area, and because those behind AI technology are invested in trying to find “ways to replace workers as quickly as possible.”
“The reality is it will suck the area dry,” Jarvey said.
Calistoga resident Donald Talarico said at the meeting he’d spent a lot of time with tech people who had “great ideas that sounded very, very much like what we heard from the gentleman joining us tonight.” Most of those ideas failed, he said. Talarico suggested Calistoga residents should not discount Kovacevich’s idea, but recognize it’s in a very early stage and wait to see where it goes.
Doug Allan, who also lives in Calistoga, said the city is not in a position to evaluate the merits of any presentation for the fairgrounds until the city develops a plan and agrees on it.
Even before the meeting began, a wave of emailed public comments were posted to the committee meeting page, voicing opposition to the data center idea and wondering why the fairgrounds committee was listening to it in the first place. Resident Hilary Simone wrote she was strongly opposed to the proposal, which she said would “damage the quality of life and the natural resources that make our town special.”
“The prospect of a 1,000-car parking structure, a data center and a heliport is entirely inconsistent with the character of and the values of Calistoga,” Simone wrote. “Not to mention the environmental impacts of this development. They would be substantial.”
The committee members defended their choice to hear the presentation from Kovacevich — and to consider ideas for the fairgrounds generally. Board Chair Shane Pavitt reminded the crowd Thursday that the committee was not there to vote on the item, and he thanked residents for demonstrating that they weren’t interested in such a project “regardless of potential economic windfall.”
“This was an appropriate item, it was an appropriate discussion to have,” Pavitt said. “Thank God you all showed up. That let everyone know, everyone on the committee, how you feel.”
You can reach Staff Writer Edward Booth at 707-521-5281 or edward.booth@pressdemocrat.com.