California legislators are dead set on passing new laws to regulate data centers. Khara Boender is playing defense.
Boender is the senior manager of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, the industry group that represents data center owners and their interests. She’s been extremely busy in recent weeks, wading through the many, many new proposals targeting their members.
“We’re at an interesting inflection point, as data centers that have been operating in the background, providing all these products and services for us on a day-to-day basis, are really coming to the forefront of conversations these days,” Boender said.
The bevy of new bills is linked to the explosion of artificial intelligence, which has spurred a nationwide race to build out the digital infrastructure needed to support new AI models. And while data centers are nothing new — they expanded in lockstep with the growth of the internet — state officials expect them to use huge amounts of electricity and water in the coming years. Forecasters predict that electricity demand in California will grow by a staggering 50 percent in the next 20 years and expect data centers to be a leading driver behind that increase.
