San Francisco pauses new data centers for 45 days while planners study impacts

Mayor Daniel Lurie on Friday, Oct. 16, signed a moratorium authored by Supervisor Shamann Walton that pauses data center development citywide for 45 days and directs the San Francisco Planning Department to study data centers’ impacts and develop controls for them, per The San Francisco Standard. The Board of Supervisors approved the measure unanimously last week. The Standard reported in September that the Planning Department did not know how many data centers exist in the city, and Walton has criticized the zoning code for lacking a definition of a data center.