Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents the city’s southeast district, plans to introduce on Tuesday a 45-day moratorium on the expansion of new data centers in San Francisco while officials investigate the centers’ environmental impact.
If passed by the Board of Supervisors, the moratorium could be extended up to 22 months and 15 days if the San Francisco Planning Commission determines that San Francisco’s 15 existing regional data center campuses, listed on the website Data Center Map, pose a threat to residents.
San Francisco’s southeast District 10 has experienced a rise in data centers over the past decade. The NOVVA data center, a 7.5-acre, soon to be 36 megawatt facility tucked into Bayview’s industrial corridor on 400 Paul Ave., was approved by the San Francisco Planning Commission in 2016. The facility launched its first phase, which brought 9 megawatts of power online, this summer. Across the street, at 200 Paul Ave. Digital Realty operates another data center.
NOVVA plans to increase its power capacity through 2028, according to its website. If Walton’s proposed moratorium is extended by the planning commission, this could impede those plans. NOVVA’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
The technology company Global Stack has proposed a smaller, 10 megawatt facility at Daly City’s Cow Palace, which borders District 10. No construction date has yet been set.
Walton’s moratorium follows in the footsteps of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez national moratorium on new data centers she introduced in June 2026. While the legislation is reportedly unlikely to advance to the House or Senate, criticism of data centers have had bipartisan support. Ocasio-Cortez’s moratorium would only apply to centers larger than 20 megawatts, which would exclude smaller facilities such as the one proposed by Global Stack. Walton’s proposal would include all new data centers in San Francisco, regardless of size.
Residents in Bayview raised concerns that the data centers could negatively impact the neighborhood, Walton said. Nationally, data centers have used massive amounts of electricity, at times depleting the local water supply, generating heat and noise pollution, and destabilizing local power grids, leading to blackouts and increased air pollution from diesel generators used for backup. Statewide, eight counties have issued moratoriums or other restrictions.
“We need to know what these impacts are,” said Walton. “Until we know what that is, it needs to stop.”
The residential area near the Bayview’s existing data centers has experienced disproportionately high levels of pollution for decades, due to significant air pollution from heavy truck traffic through the area. The largely low-income and historically Black neighborhood was for decades also exposed to pollution released by the PG&E power plant, which closed in 2006, and toxic waste produced by the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
San Francisco’s District 10, which includes Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, and Visitacion Valley, among others, has changed significantly over the past decade. Major tech firms have moved into the Dogpatch in recent years, and multiple technology projects, including Prologis’s S.F. Gateway Project, are planned in the district. These firms include Y Combinator, whose CEO, Garry Tan, has aggressively advocated on behalf of building more AI data centers.
“I do expect there are folks in tech who are not concerned about the environmental impact data centers will have in my community,” said Walton. “There are interests out there who have been spending a lot of money to see if they can do whatever they can do,” he said. “We need to do what we need to keep residents and communities safe.”
Walton’s term will end in January 2027, months before the maximum length of the moratorium’s potential end. But a frontrunner in the race to replace Walton, Theo Ellington, also expressed support on Monday for a moratorium on data centers until further environmental protections could be added.
“We’ve heard a lot of concerns from community members around general safety,” said Ellington. “At the end of the day we don’t want the residents of District 10 carrying the burden of that.”
Ellington, who has received thousands of dollars in donations from Tan and others aligned with the tech industry, said to Mission Local that he has received “different reactions from different parts of the district,” since announcing his support of a moratorium on Instagram on Monday. “But it’s going to take everyone at the table to figure out what considerations should be made,” he said.
