AVAIO Digital's 300,000-sq-ft, 99-megawatt Project Perseus has survived rezoning, CEQA, a CEC permit, and a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit that settled in December 2025 for $750,000. Community opposition shows up again tonight at Pittsburg City Hall.

Pittsburg, an East Bay city of 75,000 with $80 million in deferred road repairs and limited paths to new tax revenue, approved a 300,000-square-foot AI data center on a former golf course last year. Since then the project has cleared every major regulatory hurdle: a city rezoning, a CEQA environmental review, a California Energy Commission permit, and a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit that settled in December 2025 for $750,000. Tonight at 7 p.m., residents get another hearing before the city council at 65 Civic Ave — a fight that, on paper, they have largely lost.

The developer is AVAIO Digital Partners, a Stamford, Connecticut firm that spun out of AECOM (NYSE: ACM) in January 2019. Its founders — Mark McComiskey, who came up through Clayton Dubilier & Rice and First Reserve, and Anthony Gordon, a long-tenured real-assets investor — built careers in thermal power, midstream, and infrastructure private equity, not in enterprise tech or colocation. AVAIO launched its data center platform in February 2021 with a $375 million equity commitment from an unnamed investment manager with over $25 billion in assets under management; total committed capital is now $750 million across at least four U.S. campuses. The company carries no public filings — no EDGAR CIK, no Form D — and has not publicly named any hyperscaler anchor tenant for the Pittsburg project, which it calls Project Perseus.

The site is a 76-acre former golf course — Delta View Golf Course, 2232 Golf Club Road — that AVAIO subsidiary Pittsburg Land Holdings acquired in July 2022 for $16.7 million. The three-story, 300,000-sq-ft facility will draw 99 megawatts from Pittsburg Power Company, a local municipal utility separate from PG&E — the equivalent of roughly 10,000 homes. Backup power comes from a CEC-permitted bank of 37 diesel generators at 3 megawatts each (Docket 24-SPPE-01, approved November 21, 2025), a detail that sits awkwardly alongside the project's "100% renewable energy" operations claim, which applies to grid supply, not to emergency backup generation. Daily water consumption is projected at 58,000 gallons of recycled water from Delta Diablo, the regional wastewater agency.

The CBD filed its CEQA challenge in December 2024 and settled in December 2025. Per the organization's December 16, 2025 settlement announcement, terms include: a $750,000 developer payment into a climate resiliency fund for disadvantaged Pittsburg communities; a commitment to 100% renewable energy for operations; rooftop solar on buildings and parking structures; EV electrical hook-ups in parking spaces; zero-emission construction equipment; recycled water for all cooling and non-potable needs; wildlife surveys for Western pond turtles and burrowing owls; and insulated walls with acoustic louvers for noise control. The CBD agreed to drop its Phase 1 legal challenge. Future phases require separate CEQA review before construction.

The city's revenue argument rests on a Santa Clara comparison: data centers in Santa Clara's tech park paid $40.9 million in property and sales taxes in 2025. Whether Pittsburg replicates that figure depends entirely on who fills Project Perseus — something AVAIO has not disclosed. The rezoning (Open Space to Limited Industrial, Ordinance 24-1527, November 18, 2024) is locked in. The CEC permit is done. Energization is targeted for 2027.

What tonight's agenda includes beyond further public comment is unclear; the city has not published a detailed action item. What to watch: whether the council signals any willingness to revisit noise or traffic mitigation terms, and whether AVAIO names a tenant before construction advances further. Without one, Pittsburg's $40.9 million revenue comparison stays aspirational.