“This is Ground Zero for Data Centers”: How New Jersey is Taking Action Against Proposed AI Facilities
A graffiti-rendered Canva image.
Building community
Last December, Jennah Reddick found out about the proposed data center in her hometown of Bayonne through posts on Facebook and Reddit. “I waited three days to see if anyone would do anything about it,” the 26-year-old Reddick said, but despite the deluge of complaints she saw on the posts, no one did. “I took it upon myself to organize people to go to council board meetings.”
Despite growing up in Bayonne, Reddick learned more about her home through the process than she ever had in her life. It’s an industrial city people drive through on their way to Jersey City and Newark. But as she reached out to activists to better understand the impact a data center would have on Bayonne, she learned about the abundance of wildlife in her lifelong home, including bald eagles and oysters. But most people in the working-class city are not aware of their changing environment, Reddick said.
She initially encouraged people to attend Bayonne City Council meetings with a self-designed flier, on which she drew the city’s official bird, the yellow-crowned night heron, to represent the people of Bayonne. At the meetings, however, the Council claimed they hadn’t realized the negative impacts a data center would bring.
“Even my 90-year-old grandfather knows the danger of data centers,” Reddick said.
In April, Bayonne City Council passed two resolutions that would ban data centers. But during their next bi-weekly meeting, Reddick recalled, residents were caught off-guard when officials revealed there were two other plans to build on the site, both dating back to 2022.
Reddick noted that, apart from the Hudson County View, Bayonne has no physical local newspapers anymore, and that its aging population may find difficulties accessing the latest on data centers on their phones. “People care,” she said, “you just have to help guide them in the right direction.”
Spreading like wildfire
Similar cases are cropping up across New Jersey, which is the “ground zero” of data centers, according to Keith Voos, Environmental and Climate Justice Committee Chair of the NAACP at New Jersey State Conference. As AI data centers are proposed around the country, the state sits in a precarious position—located on the United States coast with easy access to New York City, New Jersey already boasts a significant technological ecosystem and consistently ranks among the top five IT hubs in the country.
New Jersey’s government now wants to posit itself as an AI hub. While in office, former Governor Phil Murphy appointed the state’s first Chief AI Strategist and opened the NJ AI Hub in partnership with Princeton University, tech giants CoreWeave and Microsoft and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
“With the opening of the NJ AI Hub, we are moving forward in establishing New Jersey as a global leader in technology and innovation,” Murphy said in his official release, saying AI development would provide jobs and create economic growth.
Proposals to open data centers, which are essential to running AI models and storing their information, have spread like wildfire across the state.
Local communities and activist groups have been mobilizing against them to protect their energy bills and quality of life—not just within each township, but across county lines.
“When a data center moves into a town, there're a lot of reasons that someone who lives there would be against it,” said Drew Arnay, Energy Policy Manager at the Climate Revolution Action Network (CRAN).
The stressors of a data center are both monetary and linked to environmental concerns, particularly for New Jersey residents, whose energy bills saw some of the highest increases in the nation last year.
According to one survey by the Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, while the average household paid $110 more in electricity costs in 2025 than the previous year, New Jersey’s households paid $260. Part of this rise, according to the think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective, is attributed to the expected surge of energy use for AI data centers.
In addition, AI data centers have long been known to function on massive amounts of water, which cool down their systems. Activists and community members worry not just about its energy use, but the effects the used wastewater would have on their surrounding environment.
“It’s not a popular idea to build a data center right now because they're not giving back to the communities they come into,” Arnay said.
The proposed bills/rising energy costs
In the New Jersey Legislature, several AI regulation bills are being considered, including S731/A796, which would require such facilities to pay for at least 85% of their energy use for 10 years, and S680/A1170, which would require facilities to be powered with clean energy sources, and for such plans to be submitted to the Board of Public Utilities.
In addition, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill publicly called on AI companies to generate their own energy, and unveiled a framework plan for monitoring data centers across the state. “Today’s data centers sometimes use three hundred megawatts,” Sherrill said during a press conference last week, “enough to power entire towns.”
These are necessary guardrails, said John Aspray, Senior Organizer at Food and Water Watch, but he questioned whether they would adequately prevent environmental degradation and energy price increases. “It’s a lot of piecemeal-like regulation,” he said.
In addition, although the plan would ostensibly pass S680/A1170’s clean energy provisions, it would only do so on the condition that a majority of the 13 states served by the PJM interconnection—the operator of New Jersey’s power grid—would pass similar laws.
The throughline that activists are calling for is a moratorium, but the four-point plan only proves to them that their needs aren’t being heard. “We asked for a moratorium, and [Governor Sherrill]’s just recycling things that were already in the process in the State House anyway,” said Casey Palmer, South Jersey Progressive Democrats member who has been protesting a data center local to her in New Jersey’s Monroe Township. At one Monroe Township Council meeting, she recalled, the data centers were not even on the agenda, “but people still went and spoke anyway because they see through the lines.”
“A state-level moratorium on data centers would hit the pause button on new data center permitting and construction until more long-term regulations can be put in place,” Voos explained. “Communities shouldn’t have to keep fending off these new data center plans.” A moratorium would let New Jerseyans engage in their civic duty and decide on the policies they need, instead of putting out last-minute fires.
A ticking clock
Timing is of the essence, according to Kate Delany, an organizer with Sustain SJ, which advocates for clean air and responsible development in South Jersey. In New Brunswick, she said, the City Council blocked the construction of a data center in no small part because locals caught wind of the news early, and the matter was quashed within two weeks. Whereas in Vineland, which Delany calls home, residents filed a class-action lawsuit against DataOne USA due to the noise from the already-begun construction site.
“These companies come in so quietly in the back and you don’t even know until it’s already built,” Reddick said. This is a pattern; like in Bayonne, residents are often blindsided by the news.
In addition, the state offers tax incentives for AI projects as part of its Next New Jersey Program. Currently, residents are protesting a data center CoreWeave is constructing in Kenilworth, which received a five-year, $250 million tax credit award. The Kenilworth site’s surrounding residents are saying they were not notified in advance of the project—a large 392,600-square-foot center that would cost $1.8 billion in total.
This is why organizations including CRAN and Sustain SJ have formed a statewide grassroots network to share resources and the latest news, in order to nip such projects in the bud. “Once we hear about those things, we follow up with folks in the community and nearby,” Aspray said, “and they mobilize their friends and family to turn out to, you know, the East Windsor Planning Board meeting or the New Brunswick City Council meeting.”
For Palmer, it is as simple as showing up at meetings and rallies in the next town over, and volunteering one’s own time to dig through public records to find out what motivates planning boards and councils to allow data center construction.
It is also a bipartisan, deeply unifying effort. Palmer was shocked when she shared an article on Facebook about Trump’s Three Executive Orders to fast-track AI development, and “no one argued from the Republican side.” Palmer, a progressive Democrat, still gets somewhat nervous talking to MAGA Republicans. “I don’t know how they’re gonna react to me,” she said, “but they all agreed that, ‘No, this isn’t okay.’” In South Jersey in particular, she said, people value their wide-open spaces and lack of development compared to North Jersey. In addition, they are concerned about the impacts on their water supply, as they have been under a drought warning for two years. Palmer herself is raising her children there, and wants a good environment for them to grow up in.
Back in Bayonne, Reddick has similar motivations. “The younger generation has to step up,” she said, “and this is where we’ll be living for the rest of our lives, most likely.” She has observed her neighbors wanting more activities for their children and small businesses, which used to line their now-empty main street. Reddick recalled her first City Council meeting in December, where council members stated that there had been plenty of dissent against the data centers online, but it didn’t matter if those complaints weren’t shared with them in person. Since then, in-person participation has grown, in no small part because others have been motivated to act. “There’s little embers,” she said, “that we can grow into a bigger fire.”
