NO DATA CENTERs IN OAKLAND!

When capitalists invest in AI, it's for one goal: increasing their profits by eliminating jobs. And that isn’t happening far off in the future, it's right at our door. Already the entry level job market is the worst it's been in 37 years. In the next two to five years, median estimates say 9.3 million jobs will be eliminated nationwide. Oakland and San Francisco are expected to be among the most impacted areas in the country, with 8.5% of all jobs eliminated. That is 196,000 jobs lost, with a total income loss of $24.6 million for the region. Any short term gain of jobs is nothing compared to the vast majority of jobs for-profit AI development will destroy in the region. 

It doesn’t matter the size of their data center. The capitalist development of AI means destroying thousands of jobs right here. We’re fighting to ban this data center in Oakland, but this struggle is bigger than one data center. It's about who holds the power to benefit from technology and its massive profits, the working people in Oakland or tech billionaires. 

This is a playbook Oakland has seen many times before: banks and investors leverage a financial crisis to make billions for themselves by displacing Black and brown Oakland residents. We saw this when from 1990 to 2011, during the rise of big tech in the Bay Area, Oakland lost almost half of its Black population. This happened during the financial crisis of 2008, when banks and institutional investors acquired thousands of foreclosed homes in Oakland, 92% of which were in the flatlands. And as tenants were priced out of San Francisco in the 2010s, Oakland’s landlords and real estate developers raised rents to levels many couldn’t afford, further increasing the displacement of Black residents. 

Oakland doesn’t need to repeat its past. The spillover of AI companies into Oakland, and the subsequent skyrocketing rent and displacement are not inevitable. Already working people in Oakland are feeling the effects. In June, Oakland had the second highest rent increase in the nation. In just the last year, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment has gone up 13%. Evictions are up 4% compared to last year. 

These steep rent increases are happening when many Oaklanders already struggle to afford housing. Citywide half of Oakland residents are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent. Black residents face even higher levels: 58% of Black Oaklanders are rent burdened. The current economic pressure on working class families means Oakland is set up to repeat the same cycle of displacement and billionaire profits that it did in the first tech boom. 

This struggle is about stopping the pattern where Oakland sells the city to the highest bidder, and makes residents who are already struggling to afford living here pay the price.  

This fight is about who controls the future of Oakland: the people, or the ultra wealthy. In California, 73% of people oppose a data center being built in their community. The people of Oakland have not had any say in whether or not the data center should be built. No matter the size of the data center, the tech billionaires trying to build it are interested in transforming downtown to fit their own vision of Oakland. The people who live, work, and raise families in Oakland should determine the future of Oakland . But Behring Company is trying to avoid public review by claiming their data center doesn’t need a new permit, because the building already had a supercomputing facility. 

What’s happening in our city is one part of a much bigger undemocratic process happening across the country. The Trump administration has signed executive orders to allow our retirement funds to be invested in non-traditional assets, opening the door for millions of our retirements to be invested in the private equity companies that are investing billions in AI infrastructure . This could wipe out retirements for millions of people if the AI bubble bursts. On the other hand, if AI companies do become profitable, that means millions of our jobs are destroyed. Working people have had no say in the lose-lose situation that the capitalist development of AI is putting working people in.

Tech companies are projected to spend 581 billion this year on AI infrastructure . In the next 5 years, that number is projected to be four to eight trillion of investment .  No one voted for this. But tech billionaires are choosing to invest society-changing amounts of money to chase their profit margin, not meet the urgent needs of housing, healthcare and stopping climate change that working people face every day.

The Behring data center is not a hyperscale datacenter. But that doesn’t mean it's good for the environment. The Behring facility still requires the training of AI models at other data centers to operate. That means all the environmental destruction from other data centers is the price other communities pay for the models to be run at a smaller facility like Behring. A facility like the Behring data center and a hyperscale data center are not separate issues. They’re part of the same problem. 

As long as tech billionaires control AI, destroying the planet will just be treated as just another cost for winning the AI race. The rapid development of AI data centers will create a nationwide 45-gigawatt energy shortage by 2028, and they’re already delaying coal plant closures to compensate. In the largest energy market in the US, they’ve cancelled plans to retire 60% of the coal, gas, and oil power plants that were supposed to go offline this year. In many cases, data centers are building their own gas power plants, which would add as much pollution as half of all passenger vehicles in the country. And even if Behring’s facility is comparably smaller, they still haven’t disclosed the actual environmental impacts it will have on the region.

While the most direct pollution from for-profit AI data centers happens to communities outside of Oakland, the overall impact on the climate crisis is the same. That increases the wildfires we see here in California. The persistent droughts year after year. The heat waves that kill people. 

The massive investments going to for-profit AI datacenters could be directed to stopping the climate crisis. Instead, it's putting fuel on an already burning planet.