There’s been some hullabaloo recently vis-a-vis Arcata’s data center, the hulking grey and blue building bounded by 11th Street and the Bay Trail, people claiming with all-knowing certainty that it’s secretly owned by an AI company, that it’s the culprit behind the city’s rising water rates and any bumps in their electric bills. Little of that is true, a city building official said at last night’s city council meeting. 

The confusion derives mainly from ignorance of what a data center is. It’s an umbrella term that shelters a lot of ground, but most people understand it to mean a facility where artificial intelligence programs do their computing. That’s partially accurate, but incomplete: data centers are simply buildings used to house computer systems. The one in Arcata (official name: EDCACV01) is a waypoint for two undersea fiber-optic cables that span more than 10,000 miles from Singapore all the way to Eureka, where they enter the bay via the old pulp mill. It’s owned by EdgeConnex, which owns data centers worldwide. 

Hating data centers is a bipartisan sport, fueled by the oft-reckless way the tech companies that use them burn through energy and water to keep their AI programs on the cutting edge. A big, AI-focused data center — a “hyperscale” data center, in tech parlance — can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes and can consume as much as 5 million gallons of water daily, about the same amount as a town of 30,000 people does. They often drive up nearby residents’ utilities’ costs, and worried Arcata residents have reached out to City Hall. Building official Joe Bishop told the council last night that he’s fielded numerous calls from Arcatans, upset by the possibility that EDCACV01 is blowing through the city’s water and power supply and wasting their money. 

It’s not an even comparison, he said. The gargantuan data centers chugging as much water as whole towns are using it to cool down acres of steaming computer processors. Arcata’s data center doesn’t house any of those; the only water it uses is for toilet flushing and handwashing. It’s also much smaller. EDCACV01 is 10,000 square feet, and the largest single-building data center is just under a million. If someone plopped the largest data center complex — almost 18 million square feet of sprawling buildings — down in the middle of town, it would swallow most of Arcata’s downtown. Its energy consumption is also proportionally scaled. Its peak energy draw is about half of a megawatt, roughly equivalent to what 400 homes need all at once.

If any more companies want to construct a data center in Arcata, they’re only allowed to in parcels zoned for “industrial general” uses, and if the planning commission granted it a conditional use permit. It’s handy for tech companies to be near the fiber optic cables for their speed and convenience, Bishop said, and City Manager Merritt Perry said he knew of at least one that’s interested. State law allows the council to enact a moratorium on their construction if it wishes, Bishop said; it’d need a four-fifths “aye” vote and would last for 45 days, or a bit under a year with an extension.

Three of the council members (Sarah Schaefer, Stacy Atkins-Salazar, and Meredith Matthews) said they were interested in adopting a moratorium, to give them some time to consider updating the city’s land use code to clarify what kinds of data centers should be permitted, if any. Atkins-Salazar said she’d like to vote on one at the next council meeting.

“I think we need to hold up,” Schaefer said, making an umpire’s safe symbol, “and figure out what it is that Arcata wants, what is appropriate, what is not appropriate, what does the community not want, which, I think, is a lot of these things.”