A tale of two cities: San Francisco banning data centers, while Santa Clara is building more

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 sq...