More than 3,000 data centres already operate in the United States, with over 1,500 more in development. The Bay Area — home to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta — sits at the centre of that expansion, and residents are pushing back. Seven cities including San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond have passed temporary moratoriums on data centre construction in the final months before Tuesday's midterm elections. The protests outside Oakland City Hall, where activists dressed as cardboard robots chanted against new builds, are the visible surface of a deeper resource conflict. The core tension is straightforward: data centres require 24-hour power and enormous water volumes for cooling, and they emit enough waste heat to raise local land surface temperatures by up to 9 degrees Celsius. In Oakland, where power prices have already climbed significantly, activists argue the city is choosing to route scarce grid capacity to corporate servers rather than households. Carlos Gutierrez of Communities for a Better Environment put it bluntly: some residents are already considering shutting off their power. The issue has become a genuine wedge in the race to replace Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring after 39 years in the House. Democrat Connie Chan, who helped pass San Francisco's moratorium, wants a nationwide pause on data centres until AI regulation catches up. Her opponent Scott Wiener opposes blanket bans, warning they could undermine AI regulation efforts. A USC poll from mid-October showed Wiener leading 47 to 41 percent, but the data centre question is reshaping the left flank of the race. Public opinion is running hard against the centres. A CNBC poll found 63 percent of registered voters oppose data centres within 10 miles of their homes. Political analyst Shum Preston argues developers are staying quiet strategically — letting moratoriums pass rather than forcing their allies on city councils into difficult pre-election votes. The real fights, Preston says, will come when the 45-day pauses expire and election season cools. The moratoriums themselves face structural problems. San Francisco's planning code still defines data centres as "internet service exchanges" — a category created in 2001, decades before the AI boom. Supervisor Shamann Walton has argued this outdated language makes it impossible to even count existing data centres, let alone regulate their power and water consumption. Roger Lin of the Center for Biological Diversity notes that nondisclosure agreements often prevent local air quality boards from assessing data centre emissions. Forty-five days is not enough time to document impacts and frame regulations, and industry supporters know it. AI boosters point to Anthropic's forthcoming IPO as evidence of a flourishing sector with downstream economic benefits. But residents at San Francisco City Hall hearings are not buying the trickle-down framing. The city already has some of the highest and fastest-growing rental prices in the country. The fear is not that AI won't generate wealth — it's that the wealth will concentrate among the same people who already have it, while energy costs, heat, and water stress are distributed to everyone else. The pattern is familiar: an extractive infrastructure buildout where benefits accrue to capital and costs are socialized onto residents and the grid. Whether these moratoriums produce real regulation or merely defer the fight past election day will determine whether this is governance or theatre.
