AI Fueling Continued Growth in NJ Data Center Market

Despite rising energy costs and major capacity shortfalls, New Jersey continues to draw interest as a destination for new data center development.

That’s according to a new report by JLL, which said the state was “quietly becoming a top five market with record demand from financial services and (artificial intelligence) deployments.” The firm pointed to several high-profile data center projects that have been announced in 2025, including the first phase of a massive complex in Vineland by Nebius Group NV, an Amsterdam-based company, and a development in Kenilworth by cloud computing startup CoreWeave.

The report said New Jersey, which has 531 megawatts of inventory and a 4 percent vacancy rate, has some 19 megawatts under construction and 124 megawatts planned. That reflects the unmet need highlighted by Nebius in March when it announced its South Jersey project.

“Our first major data center in the U.S. clearly advances our strategic goal of expanding our footprint in the American market as we continue building Nebius into a leading global AI infrastructure provider,” Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said at the time. “This site has the potential to host dedicated large-scale instances, and we have considerable flexibility to accelerate our deployment plans as and when we need to.‍

“With New Jersey, we now have secured expansion capacity to over 400 (megawatt). And we are actively reviewing options to extend this pipeline further as we seek to grow aggressively to multiples of where we are today.”

The JLL report said New Jersey was one of 11 markets nationwide in which data center capacity has more than doubled since 2020.

In the Garden State, JLL said requests for capacity upgrades from PSEG hit record inquiry levels this year. It also said the utility’s lead times range between three and seven years, with a large upgrade pipeline. Nationally, the report said the average wait time for a grid connection is now four years.

Read the full article for more information at Real Estate NJ.