San Francisco Pauses New Data Centres in the Hometown of AI
San Francisco has paused new data centres. The board of supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday for a 45-day moratorium, effective immediately, in the city that houses OpenAI and Anthropic. This moratorium can be extended to 22 months.
Supervisor Shamann Walton of District 10 authored the measure, co-sponsored by Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder, and Cheyenne Chen, as reported by Mission Local. Planning officials will study energy, water, air quality, land use, and community impact, with a hearing on the findings due by November.
"We need to know what these impacts are," Walton said. "Until we know what that is, it needs to stop."
This decision halts two projects: NOVVA’s site at 400 Paul Avenue in Bayview, which draws 9 MW and had applied to reach 36 MW, and a 49.5 MW waterfront building in Dogpatch that was in permit talks with Mayor Daniel Lurie's policy staff in August, as per the San Francisco Standard.
The city cannot provide an exact count of existing data centres. Bloomberg found no comprehensive tally, while the Standard counts six sites.
Europe reached a similar point first, but for different reasons. South Dublin County Council refused Google a third data centre at Grange Castle in 2024, citing insufficient grid capacity rather than air quality.
The Irish numbers shed light on the situation: data centres consumed 23% of the country’s metered electricity in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, surpassing even every urban household combined, according to the Central Statistics Office.
Denmark went a step further. Its grid operator Energinet halted all new connection agreements this year due to a queue of roughly 60 GW against national peak demand of 7 GW. Then, the problem reversed: Europe is now struggling to build capacity fast enough. Nscale’s £2B Essex site, with Microsoft as anchor tenant, cannot get 90 MW in time for its 2027 opening, and some British grid waits stretch close to a decade.
San Francisco, meanwhile, is pausing projects that Europe is racing to complete. The Commission aims to triple European data centre capacity within seven years, requiring roughly EUR 200B of private investment. San Francisco has six sites, but no comprehensive list has been made public.