Amazon Web Services is building a $2 billion data center on a 56-acre former farmland parcel in Gilroy, California, about 30 miles southwest of San Jose, and it got there without a council vote or a public hearing, according to Tom's Hardware, reported by Jowi Morales. The site sits between a Walmart Supercenter and the Gilroy Premium Outlets. The city's community development director signed off administratively under an M2 General Industrial designation roughly 45 years old, which permits "data processing establishments" with a staff-level Architectural and Site Review Permit. Construction started in July 2026. Resident Rosa Rodriguez tried to raise drought concerns and was told the comment window had closed in 2024.
Roger Wehner, AWS vice president of economic development, said the company will build a wastewater recovery system to supply the facility's water and a pipeline to carry that water to the site. Reclaimed water on a cooling tower is real engineering rather than a talking point, and it is not free. Municipal effluent runs higher in conductivity, phosphate, ammonia and total dissolved solids than potable makeup, which forces tighter cycles of concentration, a heavier biocide and dispersant program, and more frequent blowdown. Materials selection changes. Amazon ran the same play with Veolia in Mississippi, and it publishes a company-wide water use effectiveness figure of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour. Neither of those tells a Gilroy resident how many gallons a day leave the site as vapor.
Mayor Greg Bozzo's defense was that a food distribution center arrived in Gilroy without community engagement and nobody objected. The comparison is the problem. A distribution center's mechanical load is dock heaters, lighting, and a few rooftop units. An AI hall on the same acreage carries tens of megawatts of continuous thermal load, a chiller yard that runs at three in the morning, and a water account. The M2 category was written before either the density or the draw existed. Roughly $64 billion of US projects have been blocked or delayed by neighbors, almost always over water and noise, and the noise complaints trace back to air-cooled equipment.
Santa Clara County has a drought record and Gilroy has a water table it shares with agriculture. Approving through a staff permit does not make those questions go away. It moves them to commissioning, when the tower first runs at design load in September and somebody at the outlet mall notices. Operators taking the administrative path should assume the hearing they skipped happens anyway, eighteen months later, with worse facts and a working plant to point at. Publishing the makeup rate and the property-line sound level now costs almost nothing. Publishing them after the first complaint costs the permit renewal.