By Anjuli Ramos-Busot • Director, New Jersey Chapter, Sierra Club
Editor’s note: This is an Op-Ed that appeared on NJ Spotlight News
They’re doing more than straining the grid, and they stick us with bad water and dirty air if we fail to site them appropriately.
Data centers are rapidly reshaping New Jersey’s landscape, and not for the better. As massive, energy-hungry facilities spread at unprecedented scale, Trenton has been unable to keep up. The result: rising energy costs, strained water supplies, loss of farmland, and communities left in the dark while billion-dollar corporations move forward with little oversight and sweetheart tax deals.
Look no further than former Gov. Phil Murphy’s $250 million tax deal with CoreWeave in 2025, and Nebius’ five-year property tax exemption with the city of Vineland, each effectively shifting the burden to taxpayers. Nebius will host MicroSoft operations at the site.
The Vineland project is a 2.4 million-square foot, 300 megawatt AI hyperscale cloud computing provider that is under construction, although it lacks final Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) air and water permits, meaningful public transparency, or an independent environmental impact statement. The location for this project, named “DataOne,” is entirely inappropriate, as it will jeopardize adjacent commercial farmland, a wellhead protection area, the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer, and nearby overburdened South Jersey communities.
At the same time, about 30 miles north in East Greenwich, American Tower Corp. is trying to use zoning loopholes to build a data center. The site is just 50 feet from some homes. We need legislation that will protect communities from life-altering noise and heat island impacts due to server temperatures and extremely hot wastewater, as well as the air pollution from natural gas engines and backup diesel generators.
It is 2026, and yet New Jersey is allowing extremely polluting facilities to be built in incorrect places, severely impacting marginalized communities, and sensitive ecosystems. We cannot allow the mistakes of the past to be repeated. We need strong data center regulation—now—to hold corporations accountable and mitigate impacts on ratepayers and the environment.
What we have instead is a dangerous regulatory vacuum, and New Jersey communities are paying the price. How can we fill this vacuum and ensure that these data centers are appropriately sited and developed?
Before facilities are approved, local governments should require a thorough analysis of the impacts to agricultural land, local water supply, and communities from increased noise, heat and air pollution. In particular, we need to understand the danger of depleting aquifers, such as the 17 trillion-gallon Kirkwood-Cohansey, which we rely upon for drinking water and for farmland irrigation.
We need legislation such as S3379/A4096, to require facilities to report water and energy use, and A3966, to study the long-term impacts of data center water consumption. Without this essential information, communities and farmers like those in Vineland are left guessing about risks to their drinking water and livelihoods, and the state’s ability to plan becomes an impossible task, especially during droughts.
New Jersey’s data center situation is unique, given our already overdeveloped, highly populated landscape, where smaller data centers exist among farmland and communities, and next to parks and schools. Often, we find smaller, adjacent data centers growing into large conglomerates or campuses that complicate air and water regulation and amplify impacts.
When multiple data centers pull millions of gallons of water from shared resources and simultaneously run natural gas engines or diesel backup generators, the environmental impacts add up regardless of separate minor source or equipment permits with the DEP. These impacts are felt by communities cumulatively and all at once.
When data centers are built in environmental justice communities, they should be triggering New Jersey–related rules regardless of whether they are “small facilities.” Hospitals, schools and colleges are all governed by environmental justice regulations, whereas data centers have become an egregious omission. Their buildout is like erecting small power plants without adequate oversight.
In place of fossil fuels, cleaner and cheaper energy alternatives exist. Battery storage can replace diesel backup systems, and legislation such as S680 /A1170, requiring 100% clean electricity for data centers, has the potential to improve our grid and bring down costs for families.
Data centers strain our grid and should be paying their fair share, not less, as outlined in S731/A796. Tax incentives must be removed unless tied to clean energy, affordability, or community benefits.
We cannot afford to let this industry grow without accountability.
We urgently need laws and rulemaking to establish clear and strong standards for siting, energy and water use and community impact. Anything less risks locking New Jersey into a future of higher energy costs, degraded natural resources, more unhealthful high-ozone days, and less government transparency, with more decisions made behind closed doors.