Data center proposed at Ventura fairgrounds, board votes Tuesday Play

Don't call it a data center, but a data center may be going in on the beach 20 miles up the coast from Malibu.

Officials at the Ventura County Fairgrounds have scheduled a Tuesday morning vote on a proposal from an Orange County company called Global Stack USA to build a "distributed resilience network" center at the Ventura Fairgrounds, next to the 101 Freeway at the beach.

It's a data center — one of 70 data centers that Global Stack USA plans to install at about 70 state-owned fairgrounds across California. They also propose parking garages, helicopter landing pads and "edge computers" as part of a statewide emergency response network.

Last month, about 100 people jammed into the county fair board's last meeting. They were furious that the parking lot next to the ocean at the Ventura County Fairgrounds might be converted to a massive data center, a parking garage and a helipad. The VC Reporter says speaker after speaker expressed concerns about possible water and electricity usage, noise and air pollution and other environmental impacts.

Global Stack is sending its two bosses up to Ventura for the Tuesday morning meeting at 9 a.m. The company is not calling its 70 installations data centers — they are calling them edge computing centers. They would be truck-sized modular units. But they don't say how many of them would be up there. And they don't say how they would get the huge amounts of electricity that they would consume.

Even the small data center planned for the parking lot next to the beach in Ventura would use about 10 megawatts of power per day. That's enough electricity to power up to 9,000 average U.S. homes.

And the Trump administration has funded the construction of small nuclear reactors on trailers to power computing centers like this.

The company is billing this as an emergency resilience project. The company tells the VC Reporter that Global Stack's mission is to strengthen California's emergency resilience with infrastructure combining advanced air mobility, localized edge computing and resilient communications.

In other words: a helipad next to a data center, with a possible nuclear power station on a trailer, 20 miles up the coast from Malibu.