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The memorandum from the City Manager’s office makes clear that the City is advancing a historic buildout tied to 2,000 MW of new regional transmission capacity and a growing pipeline of large-load projects. At the same time, it states that no additional City Council follow-up is expected beyond annual status reports, that no board or commission input is associated with this action, and that the entirety of the stated public outreach is that the memorandum will be posted on the City Council agenda website for the April 21, 2026 meeting. That is not meaningful public outreach for an item of enormous consequence. A buildout of this scale demands public engagement proportionate to its impact. It is not enough to market San José to industry, hold press events, attend conferences, and meet with more than 50 potential developers while residents are treated as an afterthought and receive only an agenda posting after key frameworks are already underway. That imbalance is unacceptable, especially for infrastructure and land use decisions with potentially long-term consequences for public health, environmental quality, neighborhood conditions, and utility systems. Residents deserve a dedicated public study session before San José moves further down a path that could lock in major pollution and public health burdens. If the City believes its safeguards are sufficient, then those claims should withstand public scrutiny, independent analysis, and questioning on the record. Anything less would fail both the spirit of Measure I and the public the Council is sworn to serve.
Thank you,
Shannon Thomas
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RE: Item C.2 Data Center Uniform Standards
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Dear Members of the Rules & Open Government Committee,
We write as a coalition of residents, environmental advocates, public health advocates, community stakeholders, and tech workers and researchers regarding the accelerating expansion of AI-era data center development in San José and the memorandum submitted by Mayor Mahan, Councilmember Candelas, Councilmember Cohen, and Councilmember Ortiz signed May 19, 2026.
We ask the Rules Committee to recommend that Council direct the City Manager to:
1. Establish a minimum content requirement that standards include quantitative thresholds, not aspirational language, for energy use, water consumption, emissions, noise, and backup generation.
2. Publish a public dashboard of all existing, approved, proposed, and pipeline data center projects in San José that includes, for each project: location, ownership, estimated megawatt (MW) demand, amount and type of water used or expected to be used, backup generation capacity, actual General Fund revenue to date, and permanent jobs created by operating facilities. This dashboard should be live before any new development agreements are executed.
3. Suspend execution of new data center development agreements until draft standards have been released for public comment to ensure new commitments reflect the standards the Memo itself says are needed.
4. Conduct a cumulative environmental analysis of all existing and planned projects before individual approvals proceed, so that aggregate energy demand, water use, and emissions impacts are assessed as a whole, in addition to project by project analysis.
5. Ensure that the stakeholder process for developing standards includes structured, equitable, and accessible participation of local communities, including a variety of stakeholders such as neighborhood associations, CBOs, environmental groups, and independent technical experts in areas where data centers are currently sited or proposed.
6. Prohibit City staff, Councilmembers and the Mayor from signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers.
Rationale:
We welcome the memorandum's acknowledgment that uniform standards are needed. The concerns it identifies—energy demand, water consumption, diesel backup generation, greenhouse gas emissions, wildlife habitat, cumulative neighborhood impacts—are precisely the concerns residents have been raising for months. Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) obscure anticipated costs and resource demands, leaving our community unaware of project details and impacts. A memorandum that acknowledges these problems while directing the City Manager to develop standards, on no specified timeline, with no minimum enforceable content, without public input, and alongside a pipeline of approximately 34 projects already in motion, does not RE: Item C.2 Data Center Uniform Standards
resolve those concerns; it defers them. We ask the Rules Committee and the Council to close that gap.
On the Economic Case
The memorandum cites roughly 60 Santa Clara data centers generating $45 million in General Fund revenue in FY2025, an average of $750,000 per facility, then asserts a single San José data center can generate "up to $7 million annually." No explanation is offered for that ninefold jump. The Committee/Council should also know that Santa Clara operates its own municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power, giving it a direct revenue stream from electricity sales that San José, served by PG&E, cannot replicate. The $7 million figure may describe a single large hyperscale facility under optimistic assumptions. It should not be used as a general policy anchor without a published fiscal methodology showing facility size, tax category assumptions, and net revenue after city infrastructure costs.
The credibility of any economic case rests on a foundation the City has not yet established for the public: a reliable count of how many data centers actually exist and operate in San José today. At the April 21 City Council meeting, the City Manager's Office stated that San José has roughly 20 data centers in operation and 34 data center applications in its development pipeline.
A recent data center water study by Santa Clara University identifies 31 data centers. Industry source DataCenterMap.com identifies 31 existing and 13 planned data centers. These figures from City administration, an independent academic institution, and an industry tracking service differ substantially.
The City should answer three straightforward questions:
(1) how many and what type of data centers are operating in San José today, (2) what General Fund revenue have they actually generated (to date and per year), and (3) how many permanent jobs does each employ.
Staff should then publish a fiscal impact analysis showing expected revenue per facility type, net city infrastructure costs, and a comparison of what those same employment lands could yield under alternative uses consistent with the Envision San José 2040 General Plan.
On Jobs and Land Use
The General Plan identifies San José's long-term economic strategy as a major regional employment center built on sustained job growth, transit-oriented districts, and balanced land use. Hyperscale data centers are among the most land- and utility-intensive forms of industrial development while generating among the fewest permanent jobs per acre. Commitments made to data center development are commitments not made to manufacturing, life sciences, logistics, or mixed-use employment that generates broader workforce and community benefit.
We are asking the City to publicly demonstrate, with specific figures, how AI-era hyperscale facilities align with General Plan employment and land use objectives before additional employment lands are committed.
RE: Item C.2 Data Center Uniform Standards
On Conflating Traditional Cloud Infrastructure with AI-Era Hyperscale Facilities To build public support for data center expansion, the memorandum cites telehealth, remote work, and online education as services the new data centers would provide. In fact, those services run on conventional facilities operating at 20 to 50 megawatts. What is actually entering San José's pipeline are AI hyperscale campuses approaching 100 to 500 megawatts of cumulative electrical demand, with power densities up to ten times higher, hundreds of backup generators, and cooling systems that bear no resemblance to anything the City has previously permitted. A standards framework built around the former will fail to address the latter. The City should not conflate them, and neither should the Rules Committee.
On Cumulative Impact
Environmental review documents for proposed San José data centers already describe individual facilities approaching 100 megawatts of electrical demand with hundreds of backup diesel generators. These are not incremental additions to existing infrastructure. They represent a significant industrial utility demand that the City's current review framework was not designed to evaluate cumulatively.
The experiences of Northern Virginia and Memphis cited in the memorandum illustrate what often happens when individual project approvals proceed without a cumulative framework: fossil fuel capacity expands to meet aggregate demand, and backup generator operations produce nitrogen oxide emissions at levels that trigger public health concerns. The memorandum raises these examples but does not ask whether San José's current regulatory framework would prevent the same outcomes. We are asking that question now, and we want a specific answer before additional projects advance.
The memorandum correctly identifies the stakes. The standards development process the memo initiates is only meaningful if it produces enforceable requirements, is grounded in honest fiscal and environmental analysis, addresses the full range of residents concerns and reflects their input, and is completed before the pipeline of pending projects forecloses the choices it is meant to inform.
We look forward to engaging constructively in that process and urge the Rules Committee to ensure it moves with the urgency and specificity these highly impactful decisions require.
Respectfully,
Nova Jayaraj
Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action
Linda Hutchins-Knowles
Mothers Out Front Silicon Valley Co-founder
San José resident
Praneetha Potiny
Tech Workers Coalition Bay Area
Joseph Richardson
Open Source San José, Executive Director
San José resident
Ellina Yin
Dreaming Collaborative, CEO
San José resident
For some context, please take some time to watch the documentary titled "Beyond the Mirage:
the Future of Water in the West" that I've linked to below:
https://www.pbs.org/video/beyond-the-mirage-the-future-of-water-in-the-west-3x6JD1/ This documentary is available on PBS.
During the budget presentation for the District 2 residents, you (Mayor Mahan) stated that you think the water usage/demand for data centers is overstated. The following reports that have been compiled by non-profit entities with NO stake in rush to build data centers. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.ceres.org/resources/reports/drained-by-data-the-cumulative-impact-of-data-centerson-regional-water-stress In addition to the fact that we do not have enough water for all these data centers, I am certain that you have all seen photos or videos of how data centers affect the quality of the water near data centers. It has been widely reported by news outlets. Representative AOC held up a mason jar full of brown cloudy water that was taken from a home tap near a data center.
My question to Matt Mahan and each council member is "Would you live near a data center?" You (Mayor Mahan) also mentioned that you have a deal with PG&E to rebuild San Jose's power grid. That may be great, but it will not address the long-term stress of all that energy usage on the local climate (they create heat sinks locally) and on a broader scale. See the following article:
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-energy-needs-are-upending-power-grids-andthreatening-the-climate Here is a link to entire series of EEESI's reports on impacts of data centers. https://www.eesi.org/data-center-impacts
Each one of these reports needs to be REQUIRED READING for each one of you. If you are unwilling to read these objective sources, I would go so far as to state your you are not doing your job.
Do you really trust the tech. oligarchs? Do you trust PG&E? Promises are so easy to make, and they are even easier to break. I, for one, am very skeptical of all the sweet deals you made with industry and PG&E as you and the council shove these unwanted data centers down our throats. I am sure that I am not alone in my skepticism.
FLOCK CAMERAS
Secondly, I want to push back on some of the use of Flock cameras in San Jose.
You stated that they have helped solved crimes, and that sounds good on the face of it. I do not recall that you (Mayor Mahan) provided any specific statistics. I could be mistaken.
You did state that they are not pointed at houses of worship or schools, and I certainly appreciate that consideration. You also mentioned that the data is only retained for 30 days. 6/2/26, 11:08 AM Inbox - Rules and Open Government Committee Agendas - Outlook https://outlook.cloud.microsoft/mail/[email protected]/inbox/id/AAQkADhhYzk3NTk1LTBmZDAtNDc4Yi1hN2Q0LTZjNmZjNTk5M… 2/3 This message is from outside the City email system. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources.
That is somewhat of a safety measure, but some creepy person with access to the camera data can still stalk another person.
I simply do not understand the need for these ghastly surveillance machines that are attached to a vast network. I understand that you and the council may think you have an iron-clad safe agreement with the Flock camera company, but these billionaires have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted. Why would you trust them? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/06/flock-cameras-privacyconcerns I have lived in San Jose for the past 30 years, and I am not in favor of these drastic changes.
Let's stop installing Flock cameras in San José. And let's not build any more data centers.
Enough is Enough.
Finally, ask yourselves if the average citizen in San Jose or in the United States is asking for AI to take over our economy? I heard you state at the budget meeting that AI is coming whether we want it or not. But why must the majority of citizens accept what the billionaire oligarchs are telling us what the future holds?! They are in the minority, but they have all the power. It's ridiculous. They can all run and hide (their bunkers) when the consequences of their irresponsible treatment of the planet and our privacy come to pass.
I hope to hear from at least Mayor Mahan and Council member Campos that the concerns I raised are being taken seriously.
Thank you,
Carolyn Donlin
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Increase community engagement, both city-wide and significant radius around each project Mandate 100% clean energy and backup power (no diesel generators or methane gas fuel cells) Mandate 100% recycled water
Require data centers to pay for 100% or more of the grid updates they require: eg. pay into the grid improvements we all need
Thank you,
Aahaan Jain,
SJ Constituent and student at Lynbrook High School
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8. 9.
10. 11. Extensively involve the community in the development projects
12. 13.
14. 15. Use only clean energy, backup power, and recycled water for running and developing data centers (diesel, methane, etc. are to be avoided
16. at all costs)
17. 18.
19. 20. Require all data centers to fully self fund all the grid updates they require
21. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Catherine
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This message is from outside the City email system. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources. to provide input on strengthening regulations regarding the AI data centers being proposed in our city.
While I support technological development, I believe the current proposal needs greater depth and clarity to fully address community concerns and protect public well being. Therefore, I implore the Rules Committee to recommend that the City Manager:
Ensure full public transparency and prohibit non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that limit public access to information about data center projects.
Pause new data center development until stronger and more comprehensive safeguards are established.
Increase community engagement throughout the planning process, including outreach both citywide and within a significant radius of each proposed project.
Require 100% clean energy and clean backup power sources, with no diesel generators or methane gas fuel cells.
Mandate the use of 100% recycled water.
Require data centers to fully fund, or more than fully fund, the grid upgrades and infrastructure improvements needed to support their operations, ensuring costs are not passed on to residents.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Eshal Mohsin
Leland High School Student
Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action Member
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7. 8. Publish a public
9. dashboard
10. of all existing, approved, proposed, and pipeline data center projects in San José that includes, for each project: location, ownership, estimated megawatt (MW) demand, amount and type of water used or expected to be used, backup generation capacity, actual
11. General Fund revenue to date, and permanent jobs created by operating facilities. This dashboard should be live before any new development agreements are executed.
12. 13.
14. 15. Establish a minimum content
16. requirement that standards include quantitative
17. thresholds, not aspirational
18. language, for energy use, water consumption, emissions, noise, and backup generation.
19. 20.
21. 22. Conduct a
23. cumulative environmental
24. analysis of all existing
25. and planned projects before individual approvals proceed, so that aggregate energy demand, water use, and emissions impacts are assessed as a whole, in addition to project by project analysis.
26. 27.
28. 29. Ensure that the stakeholder
30. process for developing standards includes structured, equitable, and accessible
31. participation of local communities,
32. including a variety of stakeholders such as neighborhood associations, CBOs, environmental groups, and independent technical experts in areas where data centers are currently sited or proposed.
33. 34.
35. 36. Prohibit City staff, Councilmembers
37. and the Mayor from signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers.
38. As with every new technology, it is far more important that we complete the data center buildout right than that we do so quickly. A relatively small number of temporary jobs and a possible boost in tex revenues mean nothing if data centers outway these benefits with their costs: in health-harming pollution, in utility-bill raising grid expansion, and in climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Please do your part to do right by San José residents and our climate future.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
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Sincerely,
Mani Bekele, District 3 Resident
Youth Director, Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action (SVYCA) 6/9/26, 9:56 AM Mail - Rules and Open Government Committee Agendas - Outlook https://outlook.cloud.microsoft/mail/[email protected]/inbox/id/AAQkADhhYzk3NTk1LTBmZDAtNDc4Yi1hN2Q0LTZjNmZjNTk5M… 3/3
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4. Conduct a cumulative environmental analysis of all existing and planned projects before individual approvals proceed, so that aggregate energy demand, water use, and emissions impacts are assessed as a whole, in addition to project by project analysis.
5. Ensure that the stakeholder process for developing standards includes structured, equitable, and accessible participation of local communities, including a variety of stakeholders such as neighborhood associations, CBOs, environmental groups, and independent technical experts in areas where data centers are currently sited or proposed.
6. Prohibit City staff, Councilmembers and the Mayor from signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Best,
Kanika Rawat
Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action (SVYCA)
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6. 7.
8. Publish a public dashboard of all existing, approved, proposed, and pipeline data center projects in San José that includes, for each
9. project: location, ownership, estimated megawatt (MW) demand, amount and type of water used or expected to be used, backup generation capacity, actual General Fund revenue to date, and permanent jobs created by operating facilities. This dashboard should be
10. live before any new development agreements are executed.
11. 12.
13. 14. Suspend execution of new data center development agreements until draft standards have been released for public comment to ensure new
15. commitments reflect the standards the Memo itself says are needed.
16. 17.
18. 19. Conduct a cumulative environmental analysis of all existing and planned projects before individual approvals proceed, so that aggregate
20. energy demand, water use, and emissions impacts are assessed as a whole, in addition to project by project analysis.
21. 22.
23. 24. Ensure that the stakeholder process for developing standards includes structured, equitable, and accessible participation of local communities,
25. including a variety of stakeholders such as neighborhood associations, CBOs, environmental groups, and independent technical experts in areas where data centers are currently sited or proposed.
26. 27.
28. 29. Prohibit City staff, Councilmembers and the Mayor from signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers.
30. Best,
Anika Khanna
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Tuesday, Jun 9, 2026
Dear Members of the Rules & Open Government Committee,
We write as a collaboration of residents, environmental advocates, public health advocates, community stakeholders, and tech workers and researchers, to address both the accelerating expansion of AI-era data center development in San José and the memorandum submitted by Mayor Mahan, Councilmember Candelas, Councilmember Cohen, and Councilmember Ortiz signed May 19, 2026.
We ask the Rules Committee to recommend that Council direct the City Manager to do the following.
1. Establish a minimum content requirement that standards include quantitative thresholds, not aspirational language, for energy use, water consumption, emissions, noise, and backup generation.
2. Publish a public dashboard of all existing, approved, proposed, and pipeline data center (or similar) projects in San José that includes, for each project: location, ownership, estimated megawatt (MW) demand, amount and type of water used or expected to be used, backup generation capacity fuel type (batteries, natural gas, diesel, etc.), actual General Fund revenue to date, and permanent jobs created by operating facilities. This dashboard should be live before any new development agreements are executed.
3. Suspend execution of new data center development agreements until draft standards have been released for public comment to ensure new commitments reflect the standards the Memo itself says are needed.
4. Conduct a cumulative environmental analysis of all existing and planned projects before individual approvals proceed, so that aggregate energy demand, water use, and emissions impacts are assessed as a whole, in addition to project by project analysis.
5. Ensure that the stakeholder process for developing standards includes structured, equitable, and accessible participation of local communities, including a diverse range of stakeholders such as neighborhood associations, CBOs, environmental groups, and independent technical experts in areas where data centers are currently sited or proposed.
6. Prohibit City staff, Councilmembers and the Mayor from signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers.
Rationale:
We welcome the memorandum's acknowledgment that uniform standards are needed. The concerns it identifies—energy demand, water consumption, diesel backup generation, greenhouse gas emissions, wildlife habitat, and cumulative neighborhood impacts—are precisely the concerns residents have been raising for months. Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) obscure anticipated costs and resource demands, leaving our community unaware of project details and impacts. A memorandum that acknowledges these problems while directing the City Manager to develop standards, with no specified timeline, with no minimum enforceable content, without public input, and alongside a pipeline of approximately 34 projects already in motion, does not resolve those concerns, but instead it defers them. We ask the Rules Committee and the Council to close that gap.
The Economic Case
The memorandum cites roughly 60 Santa Clara data centers generating $45 million in General Fund revenue in FY2025, an average of $750,000 per facility, then asserts that a single San José data center can generate "up to $7 million annually." No explanation is offered for that ninefold increase. The Committee/Council should also know that Santa Clara operates its own municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power, giving it a direct revenue stream from electricity sales that San José, served by PG&E, cannot replicate. The $7 million figure may describe a single large hyperscale facility under optimistic assumptions. It should not be used as a general policy anchor without a published fiscal methodology showing facility size, tax category assumptions, and net revenue after city infrastructure costs.
The credibility of any economic case rests on a foundation the City has not yet established for the public: a reliable count of how many data centers actually exist and operate in San José today. At the April 21 City Council meeting, the City Manager's Office stated that San José has roughly 20 data centers in operation and 34 data center applications in its development pipeline.
A recent data center water study by Santa Clara University identifies 31 data centers. Industry source DataCenterMap.com identifies 31 existing and 13 planned data centers. These figures from City administration, an independent academic institution, and an industry tracking service differ substantially.
The City should answer three straightforward questions:
(1) how many and what type of data centers are operating in San José today, (2) what General Fund revenue have they actually generated (to date and per year), and (3) how many permanent jobs does each provide.
Staff should then publish a fiscal impact analysis showing expected revenue per facility type, net city infrastructure costs, and a comparison of what those same employment lands could yield under alternative uses consistent with the Envision San José 2040 General Plan.
Jobs and Land Use
The General Plan identifies San José's long-term economic strategy as a major regional employment center built on sustained job growth, transit-oriented districts, and balanced land use. Hyperscale data centers are among the most land- and utility-intensive forms of industrial development while generating among the fewest permanent jobs per acre. Commitments made to data center development are commitments not made to manufacturing, life sciences, logistics, or mixed-use employment that generates broader workforce and community benefit.
We are asking the City to publicly demonstrate, with specific figures, how AI-era hyperscale facilities align with General Plan employment and land use objectives before additional employment lands are committed.
Conflating Traditional Cloud Infrastructure with AI-Era Hyperscale Facilities To build public support for data center expansion, the memorandum cites telehealth, remote work, and online education as services the new data centers would provide. In fact, those services run on conventional facilities operating at 20 to 50 megawatts. What is actually entering San José's pipeline are AI hyperscale campuses approaching 100 to 500 megawatts of cumulative electrical demand, with power densities as much as ten times higher, hundreds of backup generators, and cooling systems that bear no resemblance to anything the City has previously permitted. A standards framework built around the former will fail to address the latter. The City should not conflate them, and neither should the Rules Committee.
Cumulative Impact
Environmental review documents for proposed San José data centers already describe individual facilities approaching 100 megawatts of electrical demand with hundreds of backup diesel generators. These are not incremental additions to existing infrastructure. They represent a significant industrial utility demand that the City's current review framework was not designed to evaluate cumulatively.
The experiences of Northern Virginia and Memphis cited in the memorandum illustrate what often happens when individual project approvals proceed without a cumulative framework: fossil fuel capacity expands to meet aggregate demand, and backup generator operations produce nitrogen oxide emissions at levels that trigger public health concerns. The memorandum raises these examples but does not ask whether San José's current regulatory framework would prevent the same outcomes. We are asking that question now, and we want a specific answer before additional projects advance.
In Conclusion
The memorandum correctly identifies the stakes. The standards development process the memo initiates is only meaningful if it produces enforceable requirements, is grounded in honest fiscal and environmental analysis, addresses the full range of residents concerns and reflects their input, and is completed before the pipeline of pending projects forecloses the choices it is meant to inform.
We look forward to engaging constructively in that process and urge the Rules Committee to ensure it moves with the urgency and specificity these highly impactful decisions require.
Respectfully,
Nova Jayaraj
Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action
Linda Hutchins-Knowles
Mothers Out Front Silicon Valley Co-founder
San José resident
Praneetha Potiny
Tech Workers Coalition Bay Area
Joseph Richardson
Open Source San José, Executive Director
San José resident
Ellina Yin
Dreaming Collaborative, CEO
San José resident
Alice Kaufman
Policy and Advocacy Director
Green Foothills
Dashiell Leeds
Conservation Coordinator
Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter
San José resident