Asian American suburb becomes 1st US city to permanently ban AI data centers

Monterey Park voters approved Measure NDC after months of organizing against a proposed 247,000-square-foot project they said threatened neighborhood infrastructure and public health.

Photo via Brett Sayles (Pexels)

A predominantly Asian American suburb outside Los Angeles has become the first municipality in the U.S. to permanently ban data centers, delivering a rare local defeat to the server farms powering artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Voters in Monterey Park, a city of about 61,000 residents where 65.6% identify as A…