Data Centers Are Booming in the Garden State – Are Local Communities Ready?

If you live in New Jersey, you may not have a data center near you yet, but chances are good one is coming soon.

There are more than 4,000 data centers in the United States, with more than 80 of them in New Jersey. Most are located in North Jersey, outside of New York City and the financial industry. However, due to more readily available land for development, as well as lower utility rate and tax incentives, they are increasingly moving into the southern part of the state.

The state’s largest AI data center is currently under construction in Vineland, Cumberland County. Another data center is planned to open 2027 in Logan Township, Gloucester County. Residents in Monroe Township, Gloucester County, are concerned that a data center may end up being built on the site of a local farm. Data centers are often enormous complexes, sometimes with footprints into the hundreds of thousands of square feet, that house hundreds to thousands of computer servers used to store, process and compute data.

Everything on the internet has to be stored and managed by servers — every post or comment made on social media is stored in one of hundreds of data centers across the world. Due to the amount of computing power that artificial intelligence requires across industries, from healthcare to finance to logistics, data centers are necessary to facilitate them.

Despite the rapid development of data centers around the world, there is a lack of transparency from the companies that build or bankroll them, especially when it comes to how much energy and water they are drawing from local communities.

Read the full article from 70 and 73 news.