Great Scott! The ‘Back to the Future’ mall could become a data center

Oh, this is heavy, Doc. The Puente Hills Mall in Industry, California, is better known to fans of Back to the Future as the Twin Pines Mall. That, in case you haven’t watched the film lately, is where Marty McFly and Doc Brown were chased by terrorists, unhappy that Doc had taken their stolen plutonium. It was an actual shopping mall when the film was shot, but like so many malls across America, it fell victim to the pandemic and the rise of online shopping. Rather than shutting it down, though, the property’s owners hope to transform it into a complex housing two warehouses, a bus transit station, and a 10-megawatt data center. As far as data centers go today, that’s not especially large. (Hyperscale facilities can reach 1,000 megawatts.) But it’s enough to draw pushback from local residents. The proposal is, so far, just that. City officials have not green-lit the transformation of the largely vacant mall into a data center complex. In fact, there are two separate proposals for the property. One envisions two warehouses, with the option to convert one into a data center. The second combines industrial and commercial development, with either a warehouse or a warehouse and data ce…

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