All of the companies that don't already have away-from-the-Bay data centers will be begging for hardware. And if your name isn't Microsoft or Oracle or some other big ams, you'll be on the end of a product delivery pipeline measured in months. Hardware is going to be fought over.
If all your data is in your own building, you might be okay (assuming you can get at it, stuff it into a truck and move it out). Otherwise you're going to be waiting for a while.
No one really has servers In the Bay Area anymore, in my experience. A few startups with legitimately special security needs and competence (Stripe), but mostly people either use the cloud (not in the bay) or colo/managed hosting (also not in the bay, usually).
There might be a run on laptops, monitors, chairs, etc which overwhelm the Hawaii and Las Vegas retailers for a while, but basically California's high energy costs, low power circuit availability, high sales/use tax on servers, etc have solved this problem already.
There are plenty of servers in the Bay Area. There are several large colos in the South Bay (Equinix has several facilities in San Jose), San Francisco has a large colo at 200 Paul Ave, there's a bunch of stuff in the East Bay as well. Amazon has a nothern california region, not sure exactly where those servers are, etc.
Sure, I have equipment in several of those, but it isn't a sole hosting location for most large tech companies. Really big companies tend to be multi site. Smaller ones use cheaper clouds or managed hosting generally outside the area. A lot of the bay area gear is enterprise for local companies which would already be screwed by an earthquake, or network, etc to support people who live in the Bay Area.
SFBA is critical for personnel, not so much manufacturing or hosting.
There is about 3mm square feet of datacenter space here. There are very few large companies which have servers only here and not somewhere outside the area but which would be reasonably expected to continue operating if their servers were somehow unaffected.
Okay, but you started by saying "no one really has datacenters in the Bay Area anymore", and now you're talking about sole hosting, which is a completely different assertion.
True. (You may also note the time of my initial post; I was still awake at 0320, and this was shortly after the quake...); I wasn't being particularly precise.
However, SFBA isn't even the first location for most companies I see. They go either into the cheaper AWS cloud regions (us east or the Oregon), or managed hosting somewhere (rarely SFBA).
Bay Area companies which directly get colo early on are fairly rare: stripe, square, etc. I fully support it as a strategy, but it is statistically insignificant.
Aside from price, east coast single location also gives you a lot better latency to Europe. Asia is usually screwed anyway, but the extra 80ms makes a big difference.
If all your data is in your own building, you might be okay (assuming you can get at it, stuff it into a truck and move it out). Otherwise you're going to be waiting for a while.