They rise like mirages on the edge of the Pinelands: windowless industrial cathedrals humming with the ghost traffic of the internet. Data centers. And New Jersey is building them as if the future ran on nothing but air and goodwill.
It does not.
The truth, arriving late and unwelcome, is that these facilities drink electricity like stevedores drink whiskey. They pull millions of gallons from the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, a buried sea that does not refill on anyone’s schedule. They burn backup diesel whether you hear it or not. And when the bills come, they are not addressed to Google or Amazon or the private equity funds that own the concrete and the servers. The bills come to you.
Sixty environmental and community groups have now told Governor Rebecca ‘Mikie’ Sherrill what residents of Vineland and Monroe have learned the hard way: the state has no meaningful safeguards against the economic and environmental fallout of data centers.
None. A mid-size facility draws as much power as a city of 40,000. The largest ones rival entire towns.
Under current law, nothing requires them to pay for the transmission lines they demand, the substations they outgrow, or the price spikes they trigger across PJM, the grid operator that serves 13 states and keeps failing to keep up.
In Vineland, a data center rose on land that was a public golf course two years ago. The environmental impact statement did not appear until the building was already humming. That is not planning. That is paperwork as performance art.
The mechanism that enables this is quiet and, for most residents, invisible.
New Jersey’s redevelopment law, written decades ago to clear actual blight, now allows towns to zone entire forests and farm fields for industrial use without notifying anyone who lives within 200 feet.
By the time a specific project is filed, the zoning is already changed, and officials say it is too late. That is by design. It is not an accident. It is not a loophole. It is a door left open for developers who understand the calendar better than the citizens.
Monroe Township has shown how the Pinelands Commission can still intervene because the panel has authority over amendments to redevelopment plans in the protected region.
Vineland sits outside the Pinelands boundary while drawing its water from the same aquifer, and there the options narrow. The state Department of Environmental Protection was tasked with coordinating protections across that invisible line. But so far, their efforts haven’t stopped the bulldozers.
A bill advancing in the Legislature would require large data centers to pay at least 85 percent of their electricity costs for a decade, so residents do not subsidize the AI boom through their monthly bills.
Another would force semi-annual disclosures of energy and water use.
A third would ban developers from using nondisclosure agreements to silence local officials.
These are not radical proposals. They are barely adequate, and they are not yet the law.
People around the country are speaking out against the spread of data centers in their communities.
Their efforts are paying off, with $98 billion worth of projects blocked or delayed thanks to local, bipartisan activism. According to the watchdog group Data Center Watch, a project from the AI security and intelligence firm 10a Labs, at least 188 activist groups have sprung up across 24 states.
Meanwhile, the Governor, facing mounting political pressure regarding data center expansion in New Jersey, has promised that these energy-intensive facilities will carry their own weight by bringing clean power.
She has also promised to speed up permitting.
Executive Order No. 2 directs the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) and permitting agencies to streamline and accelerate grid upgrades, solar, and battery storage projects while promising that data center developers will bear the capacity and infrastructure costs themselves.
Residents are not waiting on Sherrill’s promises. Pemberton, Monroe, and North Hanover have passed ordinances banning data centers outright.
Other communities are considering moratoriums. A recent poll showed 65 percent of registered voters favor a pause until more power plants are built.
A petition has gathered nearly 7,500 signatures.
But local action is a patchwork, and patches leak.
The state needs a single, clear, enforceable moratorium. Three years. No new large-scale data centers. During that time, lawmakers must write rules that require the industry to pay its own way, disclose its water and chemical use, prove it is not adding PFAS to the aquifer through two-phase immersion cooling, and locate only in communities that genuinely want them. Not communities that were redeveloped by surprise.
The men who wrote the redevelopment law were thinking of abandoned factories and contaminated lots. They were not thinking of the Pinelands. They were not thinking of a public golf course turned into a humming box of servers.
Tech giants are racing to build data centers to power artificial intelligence, but the facilities face mounting local opposition over their immense consumption of water and energy, a demand that has been directly linked to rising electricity prices nationwide.
Beyond utility costs and water use, communities have also raised alarms over noise pollution, threats to historic landmarks, and a lack of transparency, as developers frequently obscure which company will ultimately operate the facility.
The legislature meets, and bills are on the calendar. The petition is live. The golf course is already gone. What remains is the question no one in Trenton wants to answer out loud: how many more forests will be redeveloped into profit before someone says no?
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