San Gabriel Valley residents unite in fight against proposed Puente Hills Mall data center

Since mid-December, when San Gabriel Valley residents uncovered the City of Industry’s plans to transform the Puente Hills Mall into a data center — a facility meant to house large computers often associated with Artificial Intelligence — they have been mobilizing to express their opposition and concerns that the new development might cause environmental hazards that ripple out to surrounding communities. 

Community members say they have been given very little information about the data center. Samuel Brown Vazquez, an environmental activist in Bassett and a member of the Avocado Heights Vaqueros, said that when he first heard about the potential data center in December, he and other community members filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain more information. Those documents confirmed it: the City of Industry was approving zoning changes and planning to allow a data center in the Puente Hills Mall, along with two battery centers in the city.

Sophia Ramirez, a Whittier resident who has been involved with the activism against the data center, said that when she, Brown Vazquez and other organizers canvassed and went door to door with fliers about the data center, she found that many people did not know about it. 

When people did learn about the data center, they were very concerned that the data center would bring more pollution, especially because it would be located near the San Gabriel Valley River, causing fires, increasing heat in the area and raising costs associated with homeowners' insurance, electricity and water bills. 

“I think all of these very fast developments are very frightening,” Ramirez said. “I think it's just a continuation of this capitalist greed and a complete disregard for our working class and immigrant communities. These corporations just have interest in expanding and developing more and they just see a way to make more money, and to develop on a plot of land, and they do not care how the surrounding community is impacted.” 

Data centers have been popping up all around the country to meet with the increased use of AI. They are often associated with danger, drawing concerns from residents who live in the areas they are located in. They use massive amounts of water — some up to five million gallons daily — to prevent the computers from overheating, and put the area at risk for fires. They also add greenhouse gas emissions to the environment.

Ramirez said that many of the community members who have attended City of Industry Council meetings have asked for an environmental report to learn about the impacts the data center could have on them. 

“People are concerned about their family members and themselves, their own bodies,” Ramirez said. “When you just think of it, if it's generational, and it continues and continues, what are going to be truly the long-lasting effects of developments like these that will just increase pollution in these area?”

Brown also said that community members are concerned about the possibility of AI data centers being used to conduct mass surveillance and target their communities ever further. Multiple investigations have shown that the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security have used AI for surveillance and information gathering.

Manuel Maldonado, who has lived in the area for nearly 60 years, said that he and his neighbors are also concerned about the proposed data center. He said that many of the people who live in the area are immigrants and first-generation, as the San Gabriel Valley is predominantly Latino and Asian. 

Additionally, he said many SGV residents speak languages other than English, which makes it even harder for them to express their concerns because the City of Industry Council does not provide interpretation services at their meetings. Maldonado said that he has had to interpret for people at the meetings on his own initiative and without getting paid because many other Spanish-speaking residents faced a language barrier.

Maldonado said that a woman who was at a City of Industry Council meeting said she was concerned about the data center because her children have asthma and was worried that the developments would make it worse for them.

“Most of us are either retired or come from low income families,” Maldonado said. “For them to impose a battery storage facility. It's a danger to our health and our economy.”

Ramirez said that in addition to people not having access to interpretation services at City of Industry Council meetings, community members’ comments were reduced from three minutes to one minute and some people have been discouraged from attending the meetings. Brown Vazquez said that the City of Industry Council also deactivated their emails because of the influx of messages they were getting about the data center.

While residents in cities like Monterey Park have been successful in getting their city council to vote against data centers, SGV residents said that it is more difficult to work with the City of Industry Council because they are not receptive to the surrounding community’s concerns; residents of nearby cities make up most of the activism, as City of Industry has a population of less than 300 people. 

Additionally, Brown said that many of the cities surrounding City of Industry, including Hacienda Heights, San Jose Hills, Valinda and parts of Whittier, are unincorporated, so they lack a central voice and direct representation.

“What they do in the City of Industry affects all these other cities touching the City of Industry, because it is basically shaped like a tapeworm throughout the East SGV,” said Steven Kung, co-founder of No Data Center Monterey Park. “We're going to stop them by any means necessary.”

Kung said he believes the San Gabriel Valley is being targeted for Data Centers because the companies want to take advantage of communities of color.

“A lot of companies think they can take advantage of them,” Kung said. “They make racist assumptions about their activism, their engagement, their level of education. That's why they're targeting us. It's environmental racism.”

Drawing inspiration from Monterey Park’s victory, SGV residents have ramped up their advocacy. They started forming a coalition of groups including SGV Progressive Action, Avocado Heights Vaqueros, the activists who succeeded in the Monterey Park data center moratorium and more people to meet, plan and strategize how to stop a data center from being built in the Puente Hills Mall. Additionally, there have been so many people attending the City of Industry Council meetings that they overflowed the room and people had to wait outside.

“The community has been so activated, we've come together, we're creating lawn signs, we're canvassing, and through those actions, we're meeting our neighbors, and there's a real sense of camaraderie and community that's developed that wasn't there before,” Kung said. “I'm starting to see this through the new data centers. The SGV coalition, we're all already on a Signal chat, and everyone's introducing themselves and saying where they're from.”

Brown Vazquez said this is the first time he is seeing activism to this extent in the area. He said that when he attended City of Industry Council meetings in the past, there were times he would be the only one there. He said the coalition is planning to continue organizing and coming up with strategies to stop the data center.

“It galvanized a lot of people in a way that I haven't really seen,” Brown Vasquez said. “It's really the future of what kind of society we want to live in. If we allow these data centers to come in, we've accepted that AI is going to be the determining element of our life moving forward. And with that is loss of jobs. With that is mass surveillance and environmental impacts.”