For 85 years, the Cow Palace has played an important role in Bay Area history. Unfortunately, a new proposal to locate data centers there for the next 100 years just does not add up.
Prince, the Grateful Dead, and the Golden State Warriors all played at the event center. John F. Kennedy proposed the formation of the Peace Corps there, just days before his 1960 election. The Grand National Rodeo, Horse & Stock Show has called it home since the doors opened in 1941, and the Dickens Christmas Fair has drawn crowds for decades.
Now a company called Global Stack LLC is hoping to reach a deal on a 100-year land-use agreement to build a data center on part of the land surrounding the facility.
Global Stack has targeted the Cow Palace, which straddles the border between San Francisco and Daly City, along with up to 70 other California fairgrounds. It hopes to operate small data centers at the locations, and promises to fund parking garages and landing pads for electric air taxis in return. The idea is framed as promoting stronger emergency response infrastructure. The company has presented the same pitch at fairgrounds from Calistoga to Vallejo.
Global Stack is right to focus on improving and preserving the Cow Palace. The building is beloved, but it needs help. It was constructed by Depression-era public works programs and has been underfunded for decades. Neighbors have spent years advocating for upgrades and improvements to the site.
But Global Stack’s offer is not remotely good enough. Details remain unclear, but the proposal mentions roughly $2 million a year per location. That’s a drop in the bucket for a huge, historic building. The promise of more parking is irrelevant to a site already surrounded by parking. Neighbors are calling for housing and retail there, not a bigger garage. And regular people won’t get much benefit from a helipad.
It’s also unclear if the tech is even ready to roll out. Global Stack executives presented their plans in Calistoga for the fairgrounds there, and acknowledged that many of the technologies at the center of the plan are years away from commercial viability. The electric air taxis that would land at the fairgrounds are not FAA-approved, with the timing for commercial applications murky.
And there is real reason to doubt that this company can deliver any of it. Global Stack was organized as a California LLC on March 2 of this year. It has no track record of building anything. Its CEO is a Newport Beach entrepreneur known for a blockchain startup, and little is publicly known about the scale or financing of his ventures. A months-old company asking for a century of control on behalf of technologies that do not yet exist is a lot of risk to take on for a historic public facility.
What we do know is that the company has ties to the Orange County Fair Board, a state body overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. That background helps explain how Global Stack became familiar with California’s network of state fairgrounds and found an audience for its proposal. But regardless of how the introductions occurred, this proposal should be evaluated on one question only: Is this good for the Bay Area?
Global Stack faces an uphill battle convincing the public that it is. Just last month, 86 percent of voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park approved a permanent ban on data centers in their city. When Global Stack brought this pitch to Calistoga in June, nearly 100 residents packed the meeting to oppose it, and within two weeks the city confirmed that no data center project was moving forward.
The public discomfort is easy to understand. Across the country, data centers have come to symbolize higher electricity demand, industrial-scale development, constant equipment noise, and growing pressure on local infrastructure. Communities are asking why they should absorb those costs while the economic benefits flow to an AI industry that is already doing quite well.
That skepticism shows up in polling. A Gallup survey released in May found that 71 percent of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their local community.
Data centers are central to the technology industry’s future, and we all use their computing power, for example, to write, publish, or read this article. But they are also wildly controversial. That means communities, including here in the Bay Area, have the power to bargain hard for the best offer.
The AI industry is benefitting from record valuations and funding. If it wants the use of a community icon like the Cow Palace, it can afford to pay for the privilege, with commitments that are transparent, binding, and enforceable.
A serious proposal would rebuild the arena itself. It could put affordable housing on some of those parking lots. It might offer direct payments to surrounding neighborhoods and fund on-site clean energy that lowers electricity bills instead of raising them. An industry that promises to transform the entire economy can afford to transform one aging exhibition hall, and to prove it can pay before asking for the keys.
None of that appears in Global Stack’s pitch, so local officials and the public should send it back and demand a much more serious offer.
The Cow Palace has hosted presidents, rodeos and rock and roll for 85 years. Any company that wants to write its next chapter should expect to pay what the facility is worth.
Shum Preston is a former director of communications for the California Department of Justice and for the tech advocacy nonprofit Common Sense Media. He is a certified information privacy professional and tracks data centers on X @DataCenterPol.
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