Amazon built a $2 billion Gilroy data center with no council vote or public hearing

Amazon Web Services built a roughly $2 billion, 438,500-square-foot data center on Gilroy, California farmland with no City Council vote, public hearing or fresh environmental review, reportedly approved by a single city staffer.

The staffer signed off under a 45-year-old M2 General Industrial zoning code, using a staff-level Architectural and Site Review Permit that required no elected-official vote. Because the 56-acre parcel was already zoned for heavy industry, the project needed no additional environmental review and never reached a public hearing.

That procedural path is the story. The site sits about 30 miles south of San Jose, and the code that governed its approval predates the modern data-center era by decades — written for factories, not the power- and water-hungry AI compute halls being built today.

Gilroy’s public comment window lapsed in 2024, and many residents reportedly learned of the project only after construction had begun. One resident who raised concerns about the data center’s water use during a drought was told the comment period had already closed.

Gilroy officials are now weighing code changes that would require planning-commission review, community meetings and neighbor notifications before future data centers can proceed. That would not undo the approved facility, but it signals the loophole is closing.

The account rests on outlet reporting; Amazon has not addressed the specifics publicly. The episode captures a broader tension: as cloud providers race to build AI capacity, decades-old zoning rules can hand a single administrator the power to greenlight a billion-dollar campus before neighbors know it exists.