PG&E Innovation Summit: San Jose announces 4,000-home ‘net zero’ community proposed for downtown using data center power [Video]

SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — A big announcement for the City of San Jose was made Wednesday.

A 4,000-home “net zero community” powered by data centers has been proposed for the city’s downtown.

That announcement was made at PG&E’s Innovation Summit in San Jose.

“A carbon neutral community where we can both serve the needs of compute power and data centers, but make them net beneficial to the new housing units that are greatly in demand,” PG&E CEO Patti Poppe said at the summit.

When our data is stored in the cloud, it sits in data centers. Those data centers generate a lot of heat and, in turn, greenhouse emissions.

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Instead of the extra heat going into the atmosphere, the “net zero” community would use it to heat and provide hot water to neighboring homes and businesses.

It’s something developer Westbank says would set …