The 'Back to the Future' Mall May Become a 10-Megawatt Data Center

By Daniel Okafor

The owners of Puente Hills Mall want to replace a largely vacant shopping center with two warehouses, a bus transit station and a 10-megawatt data center. The property sits in the City of Industry, California. Film fans know it better as the Twin Pines Mall from the 1985 movie Back to the Future, the site where Marty McFly and Doc Brown fled angry terrorists who wanted their stolen plutonium back.

The mall was a functioning retail destination when the movie was shot. Like many American malls, it lost its shoppers to the pandemic and online commerce. Rather than close it, the owners proposed an industrial conversion.

Ten megawatts is small by today's standards. Hyperscale data centers can reach 1,000 megawatts. But the plan is still large enough to draw organized pushback from residents.

What exactly is on the table?

Nothing is approved. City officials have not green-lit any transformation, and two separate proposals now compete for the site.

• Proposal one: two warehouses, with the option to convert one of them into a data center.
• Proposal two: a mixed industrial and commercial development, with either a warehouse or a warehouse plus data center, alongside several new commercial buildings.

Both plans include the bus transit station and surface parking.

How much mall is left to convert?

Puente Hills Mall opened in the 1970s and still holds 1.1 to 1.2 million square feet of leasable space. Almost nothing operates inside it anymore. The survivors are an AMC movie theater and Round1, an entertainment venue with arcade games and bowling alleys. The property still draws visitors because of the Back to the Future films' lasting popularity. It was purchased two years ago for a reported $115 million.

Why are residents fighting it?

A citizens' group has rallied against the data center plans. The group argues the facility will worsen air quality around the City of Industry, increase noise pollution and drive up utility bills. Members also call the mall an important third space — a gathering place outside home, work and school.

Protest organizer Falynn Love told KCRW: "I met my husband here in 2001. He was here with a friend going to the movies, I was here with my cousin going to the movies. We looked down over that balcony, and they were like, 'Come here. Come here.'"

Sam Brown-Vázquez, an organizer with No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, put the legal problem bluntly. "Those of us in unincorporated L.A. County are going to get stuck with the impacts — the public health impacts, the adverse environmental impacts — and there is no remedy and no recourse or enforcement mechanism at this juncture," he told LAist.

Do opponents have a realistic path to stop it?

The odds look long. The City of Industry is no Hill Valley, the film's fictional town. It has a much smaller population than its neighbors, and 92% of its land is zoned for industrial use. That zoning balance makes it harder for opponents to block a conversion.

Some California cities have moved the other way. Nearby Baldwin Park adopted a temporary moratorium on data centers. Industry shows no such instinct. In February, the City Council approved changes to zoning laws that critics say allow battery energy storage systems (BESS) and data centers throughout the city.

The zoning change, passed months before any final vote on the mall itself, signals where local officials stand — and it means the fate of the Twin Pines Mall now rests on planning paperwork, not nostalgia.