Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready... OAKLAND — While wealthy tech companies are considering opening data centers in Oakland, Councilmember Carroll Fife on Tuesday will propose a 45-day moratorium for city officials to write new regulations around the facilities.
Fife is proposing that the city immediately halt any approvals for new data center developments until officials can find new ways to regulate them in a way that ensures Oaklanders don’t have to pay the price for them.
The West Oakland councilmember said she wants to make sure the city protects residents from companies who may exploit the area’s power grid, water supply and other utilities. She also said she wants any developers to be more clear about their plans for new data centers.
“I still think there’s a responsibility for the developer to be more forthcoming about what the plans are,” Fife told Bay Area News Group.
With her proposal, the councilmember seeks to give the city time “to develop appropriate development standards and study data centers to properly address secondary negative effects and the business in general,” according to a copy of the proposal filed ahead of Tuesday’s Life Enrichment Committee meeting.
Fife added that she wants to be able to position Oakland to benefit economically from a potential boom in the AI industry, instead of outright banning it because of widespread controversy.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday announced that he’d signed a string of bills aimed at putting tighter requirements on how AI data centers report usage of resources including energy, water, and land.
The Behring Co., a commercial real estate developer, also recently announced plans for a new 20,000-square-foot data center in a former Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory facility at 415 20th St. in Oakland Councilmember Charlene Wang’s district. As the building was previously used for supercomputing, the company said last month its project would not need to follow some permit requirements.
The Danville-based Behring Co. did not immediately return a request for comment on this story on Monday afternoon.
According to the company’s website, the 20th Street location sits in a part of the PG&E electrical grid that provides a flow of electricity from multiple parallel paths instead of one, “so the loss of any one line or transformer does not drop service.”
“It is the most resilient distribution architecture the utility operates, and it exists here because Oakland built a real downtown a century ago,” Behring’s website states.
Currently, just one data center operates in Oakland — the 120,000-square-foot Digital Realty telecommunications facility at 720 Second St. near Jack London Square.
Protests against new data centers have recently picked up steam around the Bay Area, with some cities crafting their own proposals to halt any construction of them in Oakley and Richmond.
City leaders in Pittsburg, which approved a data center in 2024, earlier this year created a new advisory panel to evaluate that project’s impact on the community. The Hayward City Council in October is set to also discuss its own potential moratorium on data centers.
The Oakland lawmaker told Bay Area News Group she wants to halt new data centers as several billionaire-backed companies look to develop in Oakland.
Fife’s proposal follows recent news that Prometheus, an AI startup backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, signed a lease for 100,000 square feet of space in the American Steel Blocks building on Mandela Parkway in Fife’s West Oakland district. Elon Musk’s Tesla also signed a lease for 40,000 square feet in the same building.
Activists are concerned that both companies could turn these spots into data centers, but neither Prometheus nor Tesla have publicly said what they are planning.
“Those are two individuals that I am not fond of at all, so I’m very distrustful of what they’re doing because they’re doing it in obscurity,” she said.
“It doesn’t seem like they care too much for Oakland. It feels extractive and that’s my deepest concern for any of these.”
The CEO of the Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, and the head of the United Association, a union for plumbers and other tradespeople, wrote in a Sept. 5 opinion piece in The Hill that bans or moratoriums like the one Fife is now proposing will “eliminate the economic benefits that communities across this country are counting on, without addressing the underlying challenges.”
Fife’s moratorium would likely prevent any progress from the Behring project proposal, and could affect applications from future Prometheus or Tesla projects.
Councilmember Wang has already proposed several amendments that would take Fife’s proposal even further.
Wang suggested prohibiting the city from processing any data center applications during the moratorium and studying a possible permanent data center ban for council approval.
Protesters with the Party for Socialism and Liberation have for weeks been calling for a permanent, outright ban of data centers at recent public gatherings. They were joined by dozens at the Sept. 15 city council meeting who voiced opposition to AI companies and data centers in Oakland.
Aditi Varshneya, a party organizer, said that her primary concerns include data centers’ strain on energy and water utility grids, as well as AI’s potential to replace humans in jobs.
Varshneya said AI companies’ “end goal is to make profits by eliminating jobs.”
Similarly, Xavier Buck, executive director for the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, said “at the very least, we should have transparency.”
He told Bay Area News Group that other parts of the Bay Area, such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley, benefitted from the 1990s-era “dot-com” tech boom in ways that Oakland did not. Historically, he said, wealthy tech companies have been shying away from Oakland, perpetuating redlining and keeping capital out of the city.
“Now it feels like they’re just trying to push all of us out the way,” Buck said.
For her part, Fife said while she’s heard from protesters who want an outright ban, Oakland residents should have a chance to decide whether to be a part of a potential new AI industry boom. “I want economic development, I want responsible technology in the district,” Fife said. “We can’t be poised to take advantage of this next revolution if we don’t know how we can benefit, and we don’t know how we can be harmed.”