Los Gatos is moving to keep data centers out of town altogether. At a special meeting Thursday, Nov. 12, the Planning Commission will consider an ordinance that would add them to the short list of uses barred in every zoning district.
The commission meets at 7 p.m. in the Council Chambers at 110 E. Main St., with remote participation also available. It will forward a recommendation to the Town Council, which would hold its own hearing before the change could take effect. No council date has been set in the draft.
Why staff wants the ban
The staff report, dated Nov. 6 and signed by Community Development Director Joel Paulson, says the growth of artificial intelligence over the past five years has sharply increased demand for new and larger data centers, along with the electricity, water and air-pollution costs that come with them. Large facilities of that kind, the report says, would clash with the small-town residential character of Los Gatos.
The draft ordinance leans on a November 2025 assessment by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, published by the nonprofit Next 10.
That study estimated that California data centers used 10.82 terawatt hours of electricity in 2023, up from 5.54 in 2019, and that their water consumption, including water used to generate their power, roughly doubled to about 49.9 billion liters over the same span.
It put the statewide public health cost of related air pollution at $155.44 million in 2023, compared with $44.68 million four years earlier.
The report does not point to any data center proposal pending in Los Gatos.
What would and would not be banned
The ordinance defines a data center as a building or separately leased space whose main use is running dedicated servers, storage and networking equipment, with their power and cooling systems, to provide hosting, storage, colocation or computing capacity. The town would judge the space as a whole rather than singling out a server room inside another business.