On June 15, Caltech brought together local government officials, researchers, and community stakeholders at the Resnick Sustainability Center for a workshop on the growing impact of AI data centers on California communities.
"Data centers are not your typical one-off economic development project. They are super context dependent, as you'll hear about today. What's a good data center in one area might be a bad data center in another area," said Sara Kassir, research policy lead at Caltech's Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP), in her introductory remarks as facilitator of the data centers and community impact workshop.
Organized by the LCSSP, the Resnick Sustainability Institute, and the Caltech Science Exchange, the event was designed to connect decision-makers directly with scientific perspectives. The workshop reflects a broader initiative for Caltech to serve as a resource for local communities and to build relationships and shared understanding that can strengthen local capacity for more coordinated regional responses.
Invitees included representatives from nearly two dozen organizations across the San Gabriel Valley and Greater Los Angeles region, including city governments, water districts, public health agencies, and environmental advocates. Six presentations offered perspectives on the national data center debate, California's policy and legal landscape, community health and infrastructure impacts, and public opinion. Presentations were followed by open discussion, giving local officials the opportunity to raise questions and share firsthand experience, ensuring that the research conversation was grounded in the realities that communities are facing.
Data centers are projected to account for up to 12 percent of US electricity consumption by 2028. Local governments are often the first entities to see proposals for major projects like these and have very little state and federal guidance on data centers to handle them, shared Sarah Friedman, the co-founder of the Better Data Center Project.
A portion of the workshop focused on Monterey Park, where residents recently voted 86 percent in favor of a ballot measure restricting data centers in the city. The data center proposal that sparked the conversation around restriction had been sited 65 feet from a residential community, which is well below the 1,500-foot standard guideline.
Doug Carstens, an attorney with Carstens, Black & Minteer LLP, who represented the No Data Center in Monterey Park group, and Monterey Park mayor Elizabeth Yang discussed the events that took place from 2024 to 2026 as a case study on a local community's reaction to "a fairly typical data center proposal in an especially aggravating location," as Carstens described.
During the second half of the event, Adam Wierman, Caltech's Carl F Braun Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, presented findings on the range of impacts data centers can have on host communities. Data centers can increase power-outage risk and drive up local utility rates, Wierman explained, also noting that 10 counties nationwide experiencing the most significant health impacts from data centers are in low-income communities.
In the same session, Wierman also pointed to opportunities. Data centers that deploy large-scale on-site energy storage rather than diesel generators could potentially eliminate some direct health impacts. Demand response, adaptive cooling, and waste-heat utilization were raised as areas where data centers could become partners in infrastructure modernization rather than burdens on it.
The workshop closed with a presentation by R. Michael Alvarez, Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science and co-director of LCSSP, and Alex Halsey, an LCSSP graduate student, on continuing research examining how voter attitudes toward data centers shift depending on how their impacts are framed.
As data center proposals continue to arrive on city council agendas across the region, Caltech is working to ensure that local leaders are equipped with knowledge and insights to navigate them more confidently via events like the June 15 workshop and similar future convenings.