From Bangor to Boston to Bow, New Englanders are buzzing about data centers — which might be surprising considering the region doesn’t have any of the super-sized facilities cropping up elsewhere in the country.
There are several reasons for this, so let’s dig into the data center landscape in New England today, and how people in the region are planning for the (perhaps unavoidable) arrival of these resource-gobbling facilities.
What is a data center?
At the most fundamental level, a data center is a building — or even a single room — full of computer servers and other hardware that store and process digital information. Put another way, a data center is a bunch of computers that makes many aspects of modern life possible.
This story is part of “Awaiting Data,” a special New England News Collaborative series about why there’s no AI data center boom in New England — yet.[/keyfigures]
These facilities have been around for decades, but until recently they’ve mostly been ”out of sight, out of mind,” said Daniel Goetzel, a practitioner in residence at Harvard University’s Reimagining the Economy Project.
“You weren’t looking at multi-football field-size projects that had as much electricity use as cities. You were looking at smaller things that were powering your cell phones,” he said.
These smaller data centers run on a collection of computer chips known as central processing units, or CPUs, and they make it possible to stream videos, transfer money online or back up documents to the cloud.
The newer AI data centers, by contrast, use more powerful chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs. These chips can run thousands of simultaneous tasks and are used for jobs like training artificial intelligence and running large language models like ChatGPT or Claude. But GPUs are also more energy-intensive to operate, and they get hotter than CPUs. These resource-thirsty chips are powering the colossal new data centers companies are building, and they’re fueling community pushback over the facilities’ water and electricity demands.
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While people talk about AI data centers and non-AI data centers, the distinction isn’t black and white. Many facilities, including some in New England, employ some combination of CPUs and GPUs in their servers.
The more important distinction, according to Goetzel, is between data centers designed for training cutting-edge AI models and the ones that do everything else.
Data centers for training tend to be massive in scale and use enormous amounts of electricity. They can be located almost anywhere, since the small delay between a request and its answer — known as latency — isn’t a big concern. On the other hand, data centers used for AI “inference” — like a query for ChatGPT or a non-AI process — work best when they’re near the people or companies using them.
“Right now, we’re seeing a huge increase in training, which is why you’re seeing these massive facilities in rural areas,” Goetzel said. “Perhaps in the future, you might see more of a shift to inference, where it’s more important to be closer to city centers where this work is being done.”
Are there data centers in New England?
Yes. An exact number is tough to pin down, but there are about 100, according to Dan Diorio, executive vice president of state policy and government affairs for the Data Center Coalition, an industry group. The largest concentration of facilities is in the Greater Boston area, though there are small clusters near other major cities.
While some companies house their servers on-site, most data centers in New England are “colocation” facilities. This means private companies — like a bank, biotech firm or television streaming service — pay a third party to house, deliver power to and cool their computer hardware.
At the Boston BO2 data center in Billerica, Massachusetts, for example, the company Equinix owns the building and handles power and cooling, but the actual servers are owned by hundreds of companies.
Many universities in New England also use colocated data centers. At the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, a big room of humming server racks power all sorts of research and data processing projects — including some that use AI — for Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, the University of Massachusetts and Yale.
Are there AI data centers in New England?
This is tricky to answer, since it depends on what is meant by an AI data center.
There are no large-scale AI training data centers in the region right now. But there are facilities capable of supporting AI-related functions.
How big are New England data centers?
The data centers in New England today are relatively small compared to some others across the country. And they’re not always easy to spot. Some look like office buildings. And perhaps unbeknownst to shoppers, one sits atop the Macy’s department store in downtown Boston.
On the large end, the Markley data center in Lowell, Massachusetts, provides 352,000 square feet of building space, making it just smaller than Fenway Park. (It’s also about 2.5 times bigger than Market Basket’s flagship supermarket north of Boston.)
Most data centers in New England, however, tend to be much smaller; the facility in Billerica is more typical for the region with 108,000 square feet. Others, like a facility in Burlington, Vermont that occupies about 39,000 square feet, are even smaller.
Another way to compare the size of data centers is by the maximum amount of power they use, which can vary widely.
Some New England facilities use less than one megawatt. (A megawatt is about the amount of electricity needed to power 500 homes.) Others, like a data center in Trumbull, Connecticut, use up to 15 megawatts. A few are even bigger. In Massachusetts, a Watertown data center uses up to 19 megawatts of power, and a facility spread across two buildings in Waltham can use just over 38 megawatts. Markley, in Lowell, reportedly uses up to 40 megawatts.
Elsewhere in the country, companies are building sprawling facilities that can use a thousand megawatts of power or more, and cover more than a square mile.
Even some of the biggest projects proposed in New England — like a 274-megawatt facility in Westfield, Massachusetts, or one in Bow, New Hampshire that could be up to 350 megawatts — look tiny in comparison to the AI training centers going up in places like Texas, Arizona and Louisiana.
Meta, for example, is building a 5,000 megawatt data center in Louisiana. When fully operational it will use more power than the city of New Orleans.
Why doesn’t New England have big AI data centers?
Experts said there are a few big reasons New England hasn’t attracted enormous data centers.
Land constraints
“We don’t have a huge amount of land and areas where we could actually site them,” said Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
New England has a lot going for it, but vast areas of open space are not on the list. Plus, much of the region’s undeveloped land is forest, and residents often feel strongly about protecting these places.
The region also has a reputation for being a difficult place to build, Kates-Garnick said. Consider the long tradition of local rule, and the complicated hoops many developers have to jump through to build infrastructure. For example, it took about 10 years to build a transmission line through northern Maine to bring more Canadian hydroelectric power into the region.
“If you were a data center looking to locate,” Kates-Garnick said, “perhaps New England would not be your place of choice at this moment.”
Expensive power
Another major factor is the steep cost of electricity — after Hawaii and California, New England states have some of the highest electricity rates in the country. And because electricity is one of the main operating costs for data centers, it makes sense that developers would look for places with relatively cheap power, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School.
Grid-related challenges
Even if a developer found a place to build, got all the requisite sign-offs from regulators and could absorb the price of electricity, the project might still run into yet another challenge.
It’s not always feasible to “just plug one of these facilities into the grid,” Peskoe said.
Bringing a power hungry customer like a data center or a factory online usually requires electric grid updates. Sometimes this entails upgrading power lines or substations, but other times it requires building entirely new ones.
Though the size and scale of an upgrade depends on the project and its location, in general, New England has been a notoriously difficult to build this infrastructure, Kates-Garnick said.
Energy availability challenges
Then there’s the question of adding power to the grid to support large data centers. In New England, “it’s hard to build new generation of any kind,” said Matt Kakley, a spokesperson for ISO New England, the regional grid operator.
Offshore wind hasn’t taken off at the size and speed once expected. Solar and battery storage often face public pushback or steep grid connection costs. And adding more nuclear power is far from a sure thing at this point.
That leaves natural gas, which is fueling data center development in much of the country. But New England’s gas pipelines are already maxed out in the winter, making new gas-fired power plants a hard sell.
“There’s not been a lot of interest in natural gas development in New England in at least the last five years,” Kakley said.
Are big AI data centers coming to New England despite the challenges?
At this moment, there are no definitive plans for any hyperscale data centers in the region.
Several proposals have been floated, but some, like projects in Jay and Wiscasset, Maine, and Nottingham, New Hampshire, have been shelved. Another, in Westfield, Massachusetts, lost a bid to extend its permits. A few projects, like an underwater AI data center in Eastport, Maine, and the proposal to build a data center in Bow, New Hampshire on the site of a former coal plant, are in the early stages of development.
One project in Connecticut suggests there could be another path forward. The owner of a data center in Trumbull has proposed retrofitting the facility for AI. At least for now, the upgrade won’t change the building’s footprint or how much power it uses, but it would require installing new servers and a new cooling system.
Data centers are very unpopular at the moment — a HeatMap news poll conducted over the summer found that 75% of Americans would oppose a data center near where they live.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts recently polled people about why they would oppose an AI data center, and found that 28% had concerns about impacts to the environment or natural resources, 10% worried about rising utility bills, and 15% felt it was an inappropriate use for local land and a poor fit for their community. About 13% of respondents cited concerns about AI and the tech companies behind it.
Environmental impacts
Data center critics often cite concerns about air pollution and climate emissions.
There is a national shortage of natural gas turbines, which are used in power plants to generate electricity, and in the rush to build out data center capacity, many developers have relied on less efficient — and more polluting — strategies, Peskoe said.
“You have all sorts of examples of companies like Caterpillar, which makes construction equipment, now supplying [engines and turbines to] data centers. You have Elon Musk down in the Memphis area just stringing together these tiny unpermitted generators around his facility. All kinds of these things are popping up,” he said, “because these companies are just desperate to get electricity as quickly as they can.”
The environmental concerns about data centers also extend to their onsite back-up power systems. For the most part, that’s diesel generators, which emit air pollution and can be noisy.
In Lowell, people living near the data center say they smell exhaust fumes every time the operator tests the generators, and they’re frequently bothered by the noise. The problem is so bad that a group of residents sued the owner and the state for allowing additional generators on the site. Markley, the owner of the facility, says it follows all state rules about how frequently it can test its generators.
Water use
Another commonly cited concern about data centers is that they’re insatiably thirsty and can drain local water supplies.
Water is used to help cool the computer chips, but the truth here is complicated. While some data centers consume huge quantities of water, many of the newest and most controversial facilities use a more modern cooling system that recycles water. These systems, however, require more electricity — and some forms of electricity generation are water-intensive.
The overall impact on water resources also depends on whether the location is drought-prone or in a relatively water-abundant region.
Impact on electricity prices
In some parts of the country, there’s evidence that data centers have caused residents’ electricity bills to rise. This can happen when the cost of building new infrastructure is shared by all power customers, and when data center construction outpaces the ability of the region to build new power plants, which creates an imbalance between electric supply and demand.
The most extreme version of this imbalance has occurred in the area of the grid that covers the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, known as the PJM Interconnection. Since 2024, customers in 13 states and Washington, D.C. have paid an extra $29 billion because demand for data centers is growing faster than the region’s ability to build new power plants, according to a New York Times report.
Policymakers could take steps to insulate residents from price hikes related to growing demand, Peskoe said. They could also change how grid upgrades are funded.
“Our regulatory system around utilities is designed to socialize costs,” he said. “The choice we could make would be changing the system to isolate particularly large energy users.”
In other words, make the data centers foot the bills.
It’s hard to talk about data center opposition without acknowledging the widespread public distrust of big tech companies and apprehension about AI.
“Data centers are being pushed by millionaires and their profit interests,” said Maine resident Jackie Elliot at a recent listening session held by the Maine Data Center Advisory Council.
“It powers the things in society that are breaking us apart,” said Rev. Kai Wiswall of Holyoke, Massachusetts.
What’s more, many AI companies and data center developers often operate with little transparency. This can leave residents feeling blindsided when they learn a big data center has been approved without their input or consent.
What is New England doing to prepare for large AI data centers?
In towns and cities across New England, local governments are proposing, and often passing, temporary moratoriums on data center development. In many cases, the stated goal is to give leaders time to understand how data centers could impact the community, and whether new regulations are needed to safeguard residents.
And there are benefits worth considering, said Diorio of the Data Center Coalition.
“ It’s tax revenue for communities — significant tax revenue,” he said. “There are jobs for electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, steam fitters, HVAC technicians, and jobs inside the buildings too like IT technicians and systems management.”
In the future, communities could try to negotiate other longer-term benefits too, said Goetzel of Harvard.
“ I’ve been thinking about some ideas like community equity endowments where community members get shares in the project,” he said.
At the state level, Massachusetts has the region’s most robust data center policy. Under a newly released framework, any data center over 25 megawatts needs local support and a community benefits agreement. It must also provide its own source of energy to avoid increasing customers’ bills.
Elsewhere in the region, Maine and Rhode Island have convened task forces. New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she supports a statewide moratorium on new data center development and will include it in her upcoming 2027 budget, if she’s reelected. Vermont and Connecticut have yet to take specific steps to regulate data centers.
At the regional level, ISO New England is studying how other areas of the country are handling the data center boom.
For the first time this year, the grid operator included a hypothetical new 285-megawatt customer — representing a data center — in an annual report about how it’s preparing for the future. It’s also formalizing a process for assessing grid connection requests from large data centers, and considering a separate energy market for large customers aimed at protecting New Englanders from the price spikes seen in mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states.
“Just because you don’t have a problem today, doesn’t mean you won’t have a problem tomorrow,” Kakley of ISO New England said. “ If you have rules in place, and you’ve given thoughtful consideration to how to deal with it, we’re all going to be in a better spot for that.”
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This story is part of Awaiting Data, a special series from the New England News Collaborative.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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