Data centers are booming in the Garden State. Are local communities ready?

New Jersey is an attractive place to build a data center. Lawmakers and residents are struggling to keep up.

This article originally appeared on South Jersey Climate News and is republished in partnership.

Christopher Otto and Jayden Parente

If you live in New Jersey, you may not have a data center near you yet, but chances are good one is coming soon.

There are more than 4,000 data centers in the United States, with more than 80 of them in New Jersey. 

Most are located in North Jersey, outside of New York City and the financial industry. However, due to more readily available land for development, as well as lower utility rate and tax incentives, they are increasingly moving into the southern part of the state.

[See map data centers in New Jersey)

UPDATED: New Jersey Data Center Map

The state’s largest AI data center is currently under construction in Vineland, located in Cumberland County. There is another data center planned to open 2027 in Logan Township, located in Gloucester County. Residents in Monroe Township are concerned that a data center may end up being built on the site of a local farm.

Data centers are often enormous complexes, sometimes with footprints into the hundreds of thousands of square feet, that house hundreds to thousands of computer servers used to store, process and compute data. 

Everything on the internet has to be stored and managed by servers — every post or comment made on social media is stored in one of hundreds of data centers across the world. Due to the amount of computing power that artificial intelligence requires across industries, from healthcare to finance to logistics, data centers are necessary to facilitate them. 

Despite the rapid development of data centers around the world, there is a lack of transparency from the companies that build or bankroll them, especially when it comes to how much energy and water they are drawing from local communities.

These companies are typically hard to track, making it difficult to find information about their facilities’ usage of power and water, as well as their overall environmental impact.

The massive data center being constructed on Lincoln Avenue in Vineland will have about the same square footage as the Empire State building and will replace a recently-built golf course. 

It will use about 350 megawatts of power, nearly double the electrical capacity of the entire city of Vineland.

It is funded and operated by Nebius, an artificial intelligence infrastructure company based in Amsterdam. DataOne is constructing the physical infrastructure. The facility will support Microsoft’s AI tools like Copilot. 

The data center project was first announced back in March 2025, and construction was set to be completed in three phases. Phase one is already complete and phase two is underway.

The Vineland data center will be Nebius’ second building in the United States.

A Town Hall too late?

The construction of the Nebius/DataOne project in Vineland progressed quickly in 2025, with little local news coverage or community response until late in the year, when the mayor and council proposed a $6.2 million loan to the company. 

The move sparked opposition from residents who demanded to know why public funds were needed for a private project. 

“It caught everybody by surprise, caught me by surprise,” said Matt Williams, a Vineland resident and member of Sustain SJ, a group pushing for more oversight of the project. “For me and a lot of people, it felt like it kind of just snuck in. Obviously, legal paperwork and process will say otherwise, but it really felt like it happened fast and by everyone’s surprise.” 

After the public outcry, DataOne said it would reject the loan offer.

Shortly after, DataOne’s CEO, Charles-Antoine Beyney, set up a town hall meeting at the Landis Theater in Vineland. More than 100 Vineland residents gathered to voice their concerns about issues like water and energy consumption, utility rates, noise, and air pollution.

Beyney tried to reassure the community that this data center was different and will employ groundbreaking, sustainable technologies. He said the project would operate as a “closed-loop system,” generating water through condensation rather than consuming water from local supplies. 

“Most of the data centers that are being built today suck,” Beyney said at the town hall. “They consume water, they pollute, they are extremely not efficient. This is clearly not what we’re building here.”

The data center, he said, would create between 60 to 75 million gallons of water, only using a little bit of Vineland’s water if weather conditions present extreme heat.

“It means that we are taking a particle, which is the natural gas, and we transform it into six different molecules,” said Beyney. “Electricity, obviously. Heat, because we are recreating the massive heat coming from the exhaust of the engines. When there’s heat, what do we do? We use it with what we call absorption chillers. These absorption chillers, they react with the heat to transform that into chilled water.”

Additionally, Beyney said the project would pay for its own power costs, comply with New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) requirements, and create new jobs in the process.

Opponents are skeptical of these claims and say that, without oversight from the state and legally binding agreements, it will be impossible to hold the company to its claims.

“The technologies, they kind of tell as green, sustainable, not so resource intensive,” Williams said. “But it’s just difficult to trust and believe that since we had to find all of that ourselves, essentially.”

What does the public know?

Despite the size and importance of data centers, there is very little information about them available to the general public — and, as in the Vineland project, even to those living in communities where projects are underway. 

In fact, secrecy is commonplace in the data center development boom. 

“It’s generally regarded as commercially sensitive information that could be relevant to competitors, so [local] commissions almost always, if not always, grant those confidentiality requests without much debate,” Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, told Inside Climate News.

According to Reuters, with the increase of demand for AI services, there has been a shortage of physical infrastructure to support them. The Vineland Center is part of a wider effort to reduce the growing strain that is being placed on Microsoft’s cloud services by cooperating with companies who specialize in AI infrastructure.

At the state level, lawmakers are trying to both lure AI data centers to the Garden State through tax breaks, but also build more accountability.

Recently, the Senate Energy and Environment Committee released two bills regarding data centers: S3379, which requires data center operators to submit semi-annual water and energy usage reports, and A796/S731, which requires electric public utilities to develop and apply special rules for data centers to protect local citizens from increased costs or bills.

Some New Jersey environmental groups support these bills as a way to keep data centers in check.

“You cannot manage what you do not measure,” New Jersey Sierra Club Conservation Program Manager Taylor McFarland said in a statement. “By requiring semi-annual reporting of energy and water usage, New Jersey can make informed, science-based decisions about how to integrate this industry into our state without sacrificing our climate goals or our residents’ access to clean water.”

Who should oversee and govern data center projects?

Other environmental preservation groups, such as the Pinelands Preservation Alliance based in Southampton, remain concerned about the impacts of data centers – and question whether local governments have the capacity to properly monitor them.

Last month, the Pinelands Alliance published a post on their blog about data centers in the state and how municipalities are not well equipped enough to regulate how data centers may or may not influence the environment surrounding them. 

The post also included a timeline of the Vineland data center project, noting how plans have continued changing for the data center and the town’s government has yet to properly assess any environmental issues.

“While we think everywhere should really have the benefit of something like a regional planning commission, the reality is it’s a huge lift to create something like that,” said Jason Howell, the Public Lands Advocate for the Pinelands Alliance.

Though the Pinelands Commission does not have direct jurisdiction in Vineland, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection still has to coordinate with them regarding any projects that may impact the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, which Vineland draws water from.

Similarly, Sustain SJ’s Williams questions whether the mayor and City Council have the ability to provide rigorous oversight of projects that they hope will provide tax revenue and jobs.

“I think it should be a third party, maybe not someone that’s paid for by the city or the developer,” said Williams. “I don’t know what that looks like or how that happens, but I do think it should be a third party entity that determines.”

Residents show up

In a sign of community push-back, some environmental and community groups say the public is increasingly willing to question the impact these facilities have on their local communities – and can influence local lawmakers. 

In February, when a developer released plans for a 27,000-square-foot data center near homes and businesses in New Brunswick, groups like Climate Revolution Action Network, Food & Water Watch and others, helped organize hundreds of people to contact elected officials and to show up at a City Council meeting.

In response, the council voted to remove data centers from the list of permitted uses in a plan to redevelop several parcels of land. Opponents claimed it as a victory, but said communities have to organize quickly.

Residents had just nine days from the initial proposal to the council meeting.

“This victory would not have been possible if it weren’t for the outstanding and fast action by the community,” Charlie Kratovi, an organizer for Food & Water Watch, said in a statement. “This was a powerful and unifying moment for our movement.”

Cover photo: The largest AI data center in New Jersey is under construction in Vineland.