A developer is advancing the idea of constructing a data center in Modesto along Highway 99 just north of Kansas Avenue, an industrial area once occupied by the former FMC barium plant.
The prospect brings to Modesto a national debate over data centers, a love-it-hate-it industry bringing everyone information while consuming vast amounts of water and energy and producing loud noise that has been disruptive in some communities nationwide.
Some Modesto City Council members confirmed receiving invitations to sit down with a data center pitchman, the normal course for someone positioning to propose a project.
City leaders are hungry for job-creating wins, but also wary of seemingly promoting the artificial intelligence industry, which has been polarizing and prompted massive outcry across the United States – including here.
Even before knowing key details of the plan – such as the site acquired and readied by NorthPoint Development, at 1200 Graphics Drive – social media users by the hundreds are urging rejection, threatening the Modesto City Council with political retaliation and forming opposition movements.
“Most people object to big companies making a profit at the expense of the local people,” said Professor Sarah Kurtz, chair of UC Merced’s electrical engineering department.
Huge company quietly positioning Modesto data center
Until now, NorthPoint has pretty much hidden in plain sight.
The Kansas City-based company in March 2025 quietly sought and obtained from the Modesto Planning Commission a two-year extension for filing what’s called a tentative map for the site at 1200 Graphics Drive. When submitted, the document would outline details of what NorthPoint plans to do with the property.
The vacant land sits directly south of the MID Woodland Power Station and just about a half a mile west of the Modesto Junior College East Campus.
And in December 2025 – with no fanfare and planning commissioners reportedly unaware of its intentions for a data center – NorthPoint persuaded commissioners to formally divide the 43-acre site in two.
“Splitting the parcel will allow for the construction of additional commercial or industrial uses which in turn will drive economic vitality,” commissioners were told in a city staff report bereft of specifics.
The commission’s resulting resolution declares that “city services, including sewer and water facilities, are available” and concludes, in part, that “the proposed tentative parcel map will not be materially detrimental to the public welfare or injurious to other (nearby) property.”
But now, with a possible proposal for a data center on the site pending, some commissioners are having second thoughts.
“If I had known, I would not have approved it,” Planning Commissioner Naramsen Goriel recently told The Modesto Focus. “I’m not a fan of data centers in Modesto.”
Credit: Garth Stapley / The Modesto Focus
Many people love to hate data centers
More than 70% of people across the United States don’t want a data center nearby, and 48% are strongly opposed, a recent Gallup poll found. And a strong majority of Californians worry about the environmental impact of building more AI data centers, according to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Jessica Hill, the city’s community and economic development director, said in a statement that Modesto has “only received inquiries, and no applications have been submitted.”
NorthPoint’s portfolio boasts data centers “powering 37 sites across 18 states.” Last week a senior representative requested private meetings with council members to discuss the company’s plan for a data center of 25 to 50 megawatts – at 1200 Graphics Drive.
Data centers pulling 30-to-50 megawatts from the local energy grid require roughly the same power needed for a major university or large airport.
“At this stage we’re fact-finding,” said Councilman Eric Alvarez. “Is it one-time construction jobs that disappear once it’s up, with robot vacuum cleaners and one person to open it at the beginning of the day and lock it up at night?”
Councilman Nick Bavaro said, “If employees are making $40 or $50 an hour, I’ll listen. I want to see people buying homes in Modesto and you can’t do that on $20 an hour.”
The Graphics Drive site is in the district represented by Councilman Chris Ricci, whose initial social media posts on the topic ignited a firestorm of reaction. He outlined his concerns to The Modesto Focus:
“We already are dealing with inflation across the board. Data centers have the potential of increasing the prices of energy even more. They can put strain on our water supply, cause rate increases, and impact local jobs. Modestans have enough to deal with already in these tough times rather than a deal that potentially subsidizes Silicon Valley.”
The Modesto Irrigation District could be a key player in such a development because the utility provides both power and a significant portion of the city’s water supply.
A utility – and its customers – can benefit from the revenue brought by a major power buyer, experts say. Especially one with consistent demand unlike, say, food processors whose demand peaks and falls throughout the year.
But nonprofit utilities like MID must also take political considerations into account.
“We can’t do anything that would have a negative effect on existing ratepayers or our capacity or that could affect prices in a negative way,” said MID Board President Robert Frobose.
A district spokesperson said MID is tracking data center trends and has policies in place to protect customers.
Duty bound to hear company pitch, Modesto mayor says
Mayor Sue Zwalen intends to meet with NorthPoint soon, she said – as she routinely does with anyone requesting facetime with the city’s top elected leader.
“I’m always willing to hear what their proposals are, whether I agree or disagree,” Zwahlen said. “That’s part of my responsibility as mayor.”
She remembers passing the old FMC plant to visit nearby extended family when she was growing up. A “good friend” of her family was in plant management, she said.
At that time, the plant’s address was 1200 Barium Road. Starting in the 1940s, FMC made safety flares used by first responders at accident scenes, and TV tubes used in old televisions.
Unsafe practices contaminated the soil with barium, whose compounds now are known to be “generally highly toxic to humans,” the National Library of Medicine says.
Crews in the 1960s scooped 160,000 cubic yards of tainted soil and deposited it in huge piles nearby to form the base of the new Highway 132 bypass. Meanwhile neighbors, aware of health concerns from soil toxins, sounded the alarm with protests that continue to this day.
The FMC plant closed in 1984. Sensitive to the stigma associated with heavy metals, city leaders in 1986 changed the street name from Barium Road to Graphics Drive.
Since then, the site has sat empty. A massive effort to clean the site of toxins was well underway by the time George Britton returned to the city of his childhood, Modesto, as its city manager in 2001. The remedial efforts wrapped up in 2007, and Britton oversaw efforts to market the site as a prime prospect for some company – any company – before leaving in 2008, although he continues to live in Modesto.
“We were certainly active and investing in it as a city,” Britton told The Modesto Focus.
Those efforts continued in earnest when Garrad Marsh was mayor from 2012 to 2016, “but we didn’t get any feelers,” he said.
Half of the former FMC site remains listed on the website of an international commercial real estate broker, CBRE, which pitches the 21-acre lot as a “premiere industrial opportunity … with direct access to Highway 99 and Highway 132.”
What could go wrong?
Things appeared to be lining up for NorthPoint.
The site enjoys an easy freeway connection, now-clean soil in an industrial area with no homes or schools as immediate neighbors and city leaders anxious to boost the local economy. City Hall even accommodated time extensions for plans while also approving lot splits.
Then word broke that it could be a data center.
“No, no, and hell no,” reads just one of hundreds of similar comments from people responding to Ricci’s social media posts inviting feedback. “It’s not that hard to read the room; unless the council wants to be entirely voted out, they’ll put their collective foot down and deny this.”
Others note the hypocrisy of opposing the production of artificial intelligence when so many rely on it daily.
The drama has become intense enough to delay or halt 75 data center developments worth $130 billion across the United States in the first quarter of this year, says Data Center Watch. And “active opposition groups more than doubled across 49 states,” says the group, a project of the AI research firm 10a Labs.
On Stanislaus County’s west edge, Patterson leaders a couple of weeks ago enacted a 45-day moratorium on data centers. Also in July, public outcry forced Vallejo leaders to drop a data center proposal. And the list goes on and on.
In an attempt to help industrial developers find smoother waters, the White House is encouraging data centers to build on land owned by the US Energy Department, The New York Times reported.
Kurtz, the UC Merced professor, said, “There are multiple cases where a company that has a lot of money negotiates a deal that is very good for the company, but not so good for the local people.
“The local people end up with the noise and heat and feel taken advantage of,” she continued. “In cases where companies have taken the time to identify the needs of the local people and negotiate a deal that is beneficial to the local people, they have been more favorably received.”
Perhaps a townhall meeting in Modesto featuring a no-slant examination of data centers presented by a neutral, independent expert would help to inform the community – and lower the temperature, said Opportunity Stanislaus CEO David White. His public-private nonprofit would be happy to help arrange such a meeting, he said.
“Let’s have a reasonable conversation, without the emotion,” White said. “Bring in someone to answer questions and lay out the facts, and listen.”
Garth Stapley is the accountability reporter for The Modesto Focus, a project of the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact him at garth@themodestofocus.org.