Hayward Data Center: How the City Approved It Without a Council Vote

A 300,000-square-foot facility now under construction off Eden Landing Road will draw as much electricity as one-fifth of every home in Hayward — and it never received a City Council vote. As residents learn how the deal was struck, many are asking who was actually watching out for them.

One-fifth of Hayward’s homes. That’s how much electricity a single data center will consume once it’s fully operational.
The project belongs to STACK Infrastructure, and it’s rising right now at 26203 Production Avenue, with its main access point at Eden Landing Road. It’s not the only one. Amazon already operates two data centers nearby and is leasing space in a third under construction just down the road. Hayward is quietly becoming a data center hub — and the public had almost no say in how it happened.

Who Approved a Project That Powers One-Fifth of Hayward’s Homes?
The STACK SVY03A Data Center Campus cleared Hayward’s Planning Commission in May 2025 on a unanimous vote. The commission, not the elected City Council, held final authority. City Council members did not vote on the project at all.
The facility includes 28 backup generators with a combined capacity of roughly 76.6 megawatts, along with an on-site power substation and a dedicated PG&E switching station. Councilmember George Syrop later put the scale in plain terms: “One-fifth of all homes in Hayward. That amount of electricity is going to be used by this singular data center.” That single sentence, spoken months after approval, is why residents are now asking hard questions about a process most of them never saw coming.

What Did the Zoning Loophole Actually Allow?
Here’s the part city officials would rather not highlight. Under Hayward’s zoning code at the time, data centers were classified as “office use.” That classification let STACK Infrastructure’s project move through city planning with input from staff alone — no council hearing, no council vote, no meaningful public notice requirement.
The project reached the Planning Commission only because the developer requested extra building height beyond the standard limit. Had the developer stayed within the existing height cap, the entire 300,000-square-foot campus could have been approved by staff, with no elected official ever weighing in. That is not how a 100-foot industrial facility with its own power substation should move through local government.

How Big Is the Public Benefits Package — And Is It Enough?
In exchange for the added height, STACK Infrastructure offered the city a Public Benefits Package. It grew over eighteen months of negotiation, from $1.1 million to $1.3 million, and finally to $2 million. A data center drawing power equal to a fifth of Hayward’s homes was approved for a $2 million community benefit — is that a fair trade, or a rounding error?
Even members of the commission that approved the project seemed uneasy with the arithmetic. One commissioner called it “laughable” to think the facility would run on genuine renewable power rather than purchased credits, since the developer admitted it had no contingency plan if those credits lost their value. Another commissioner questioned why the city was negotiating public benefits at all, arguing the project’s economic upside spoke for itself. Neither concern changed the outcome. The commission approved the height increase unanimously.

Why Did the City Council Wait Until It Was Too Late?
By the time the City Council formally discussed the project’s scale, in January 2026, the Planning Commission had already granted final approval. Mayor Mark Salinas drew a pointed comparison, noting the council had subjected a 15,000-square-foot cannabis retailer to far heavier scrutiny than a data center more than twenty times its size.
If a corner cannabis shop gets more council scrutiny than a facility that could power a fifth of the city, whose interests is City Hall actually protecting? That question, raised almost verbatim by the mayor himself, captures the imbalance residents are now demanding the city correct. Council members ultimately agreed that future projects of this scale should not bypass elected oversight again — an implicit admission the original process fell short.

What Do Supporters of This Policy Actually Believe?
Supporters of the STACK project make a case worth taking seriously. Local labor unions backed the development, pointing to a commitment to 100 percent union labor, an estimated 380 temporary construction jobs, and 41 permanent positions once the facility opens. Backers also argue Hayward benefits from new property tax revenue and infrastructure upgrades, including a replaced water main, that the city would otherwise have to fund itself.
That argument has real merit — construction jobs and tax revenue matter, especially in a city managing its own budget pressures. But it does not answer the core objection. The debate was never about whether data centers can bring economic value. It’s about whether a project of this scale should have bypassed elected representatives entirely, and whether $2 million reasonably offsets a fifth of the city’s residential power draw for decades to come.

Has Hayward Actually Fixed the Problem?
To its credit, the City Council did act. In April 2026, it amended the municipal code to create a dedicated data center category, requiring any future project at or above 50 megawatts to obtain a Major Conditional Use Permit — a process that now demands a public hearing and a City Council vote. Smaller projects still bypass the council, but the largest, highest-impact facilities no longer will.
That’s a meaningful fix, and it wouldn’t have happened without public pressure. It also arrived only after the city’s largest data center was already under construction. The Planning Commission itself remains open to turnover, too: Hayward accepted applications for up to three commission seats through the end of July 2026, giving residents a rare direct chance to reshape the body that approved this project in the first place.

$2 million. That’s the public benefit negotiated for a facility drawing power equal to one-fifth of Hayward’s homes. The question no one at City Hall has fully answered: was that ever close to a fair price?

“How did a 300,000-square-foot facility, standing 100 feet tall, move forward without City Council oversight or approval?”

Key Questions This Story Raises

• Should any project drawing power equal to a fifth of a city’s homes ever be approved without an elected vote?
• Is a $2 million public benefits package a fair exchange for decades of added strain on Hayward’s grid and water system?
• Now that the loophole is closed, will Hayward apply the same scrutiny to the data centers already under construction?

Would you have found out about this deal before the concrete was poured — or only after, like most of Hayward did?

Hayward’s data center reckoning was never really about servers, generators, or megawatts. It was about whether residents can trust that projects this size get a real vote before they get a shovel in the ground. The city has since tightened its rules, but only after the biggest deal of all had already slipped through.
So the real question isn’t whether Hayward needs data centers — it’s whether the next multimillion-dollar deal will get a public vote before construction starts, or only an apology after.

Still have questions about how projects like this get approved in your city? Subscribe to The Town Hall News for continuing coverage of local government accountability. Think your neighbors need to see this? Share the article. Want your voice to count? Hayward’s Planning Commission is accepting public comment ahead of future data center hearings — contact the Hayward City Council directly through hayward-ca.gov to weigh in before the next vote, not after.