- Vernon, an industrial town with just a little more than 200 residents, has become Southern California’s unlikely AI data center hub, with facilities consuming power equivalent to more than 26,000 homes.
- Tech companies are drawn to Vernon’s cheap electricity from its public utility and lack of neighborhood opposition that has blocked data centers elsewhere.
Five miles south of downtown Los Angeles, a single industrial block in Vernon is drawing as much electricity as a small town.
Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review
Inside a three-story, 242,000-square-foot building known as LAX01, rows of advanced artificial intelligence chips hum across six data buildings, consuming enough electricity to power more than 26,400 homes for a year. The processors are part of a fast-growing network of data centers reshaping this rusty industrial corner of L.A. County.
Vernon has a little over 200 residents and a long, colorful history arising from its industrial roots. Over the years, it has grappled with corruption scandals and environmental pollution charges.
It was once on the verge of being unincorporated amid accusations that it had been controlled for decades by a small cadre of families and their associates. Its history helped inspire a season of the HBO crime drama “True Detective.”
Today, Vernon is becoming an unlikely hub for Southern California’s AI infrastructure.
“The race toward superintelligence is reshaping infrastructure requirements across every industry,” said Michael Wall, executive vice president at Prime Data Centers, which built the Vernon data center. “We’re working to give businesses the foundation they need to build and deploy the next generation of AI models — faster, more efficiently and at massive scale.”
Prime and other developers, including Goodman Group, CoreSite, and Digital Realty, are planning hundreds of megawatts of new data center capacity in Vernon, said Darren Eades, managing director of JLL, who specializes in data centers.
Companies are snapping up Vernon properties and upgrading them, adding advanced cooling systems to old office buildings and filling a shuttered slaughterhouse that once housed hogs, with advanced chips.
“We haven’t seen new data center development in a long time in Southern California,” Eades said. “There’s a new wave that’s hitting the coast, primarily driven by AI.”
The build-out is happening across the country.
In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta invested $465 billion in building out computing and networking infrastructure for AI, according to Goldman Sachs.
One Harvard economist estimated that without data center investments, America’s gross domestic product growth could have come to a near standstill this year.
In-spite of the radical socialists/Communists attempt to grind into dust Capitalism it continues to find a way!
LAUGH
Now the issue becomes one of HOW CAN THE GREEN ENERGY THAT IS INCREASING THE COSTS OF ELECTRICITY AND HAMMERING THE WORKING CLASS BE AFFORDABLE FOR THESE AI CENTERS.
Want to bet once they are done and the kinks worked out they will find Arizona, Nevada and other locations to move to?
The hammer being brought down on the idiot Green Energy idiots is proving them idiots. Don’t get me started on the insane tax rates here.