Santa Clara is home to some of the largest tech companies in the world: Nvidia, Intel and AMD, so it is no wonder the city is embracing the data center boom.
The south San Francisco Bay Area town has 58 data centers, the densest cluster on the West Coast, and is spending $459 million to double its power grid so it can build more. Almost all lie within the limits of the city and its neighbor, Mountain View.
But Santa Clara residents reap rewards, as local utility company Silicon Valley Power — owned by the City of Santa Clara — charges 18.2 cents a kilowatt-hour, 57% less than the 42.2 cents Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the private utility serving most of Northern California, charges.
Santa Clara also collects an estimated $29.5 million a year from the server farms that ring its apartment blocks, which gets spent on police, parks, libraries and other resident services.
“Our bills are about $130 for the electricity, the garbage and the water,” a resident at Santa Clara Square, an apartment complex surrounded by data centers, told the Post.
“If they are gonna build more data centers, then I would want to see … a decrease in rent, or the electricity bills.
The resident said she has lived at the Square for nearly five years and didn’t realize how many data centers surrounded it. “For now, it doesn’t bother me,” she added.
Meanwhile a former Santa Clara resident told the Post their electricity bill jumped fivefold after moving away.
Forty miles north, San Francisco County has 15 data centers. There, supervisors are pushing a 45-day moratorium on new ones, citing the burden on the Bayview, a neighborhood with a long history of pollution.
“We need to know all the impacts of having a data center in the community before we allow another to come inside of San Francisco,” Supervisor Shamann Walton, who wrote the measure, said at a City Hall press conference Monday.
The two cities aren’t built alike. San Francisco packs about 800,000 people into 47 square miles — roughly 18,600 people per square mile, according to the Census Bureau — so almost any site for a data center will have homes nearby.
Santa Clara spreads 133,000 people across 18 square miles, about a third as dense, with a broad industrial belt of office parks and chip plants where most of the data centers cluster.
Santa Clara’s neighboring counties, San Mateo and Alameda, currently have two data centers and 14 respectively, according to the US Data Center Map — and there has been local backlash against building further facilities in both.
Nearly seven in 10 Americans say they’d oppose a data center in their community, according to a Gallup poll in May — more than oppose nuclear power plants.
However, the very term “data center” has become loaded.
“There are many different kinds of data centers,” pointed out Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who has studied them for more than a quarter-century.
“Smaller data centers that are properly run, that do not have their own [power] generation only have the impact of a big warehouse or an office building.”
Koomey advises AMD on efficiency goals and receives Amazon funding for research on data-center water use.
Many people have also raised concerns about water use, but a May 2025 Valley Water briefing made clear most Santa Clara data centers use recycled water — treated wastewater from showers and toilets.
“It’s not clean enough to drink. You wouldn’t want people to drink it,” Koomey said. “But it’s perfectly fine for watering golf courses or for cooling a data center.”
Using recycled water, he said, keeps a data center’s water footprint to a minimum. But each facility handles water use differently, he added.
Sata Clara says those building the data centers pay their own connection costs plus a share of wider system upgrades. As an example, the city’s servers need more power than the local substation can handle, so Intel is footing the whole bill to expand it — plus about $10 million in fees for the extra load, a February council report shows.
“It’s very important for the people who are imposing costs on society to pay those costs,” Koomey noted.
Not everyone is sold. The city documented complaints about noise, height and appearance after one facility went up on Memorex Drive.
Meanwhile, some local residents have developed their own measures of the impact on the environment. One resident watches fish and birds at a local creek told The Post: “If I started to see an impact on the wildlife that is thriving off that creek, then I would probably be more concerned or have a problem with it.”
