Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Ben Dziobek’s voice rang across the night as he ran toward a crowd waiting outside New Brunswick City Hall on Wednesday.
The news? Members of the city council struck down potential plans to build a data center.
“They canceled it! They canceled it!” Dziobek shouts in footage shared by New Jersey’s Climate Revolution Action Network. Loud cheers followed, and then a chant: “The people, united, will never be defeated!”
The New Brunswick City Council had just decided to remove data centers from the list of permitted uses in a plan to redevelop several parcels of land. While no data center had yet been proposed, even the possibility that a data center could someday end up there raised alarm among city residents.
“The city administration is asking the council to amend the redevelopment plan to remove data centers as a permitted use, and to reinsert the requirement for inclusion of a park on the site that’s provided in the prior redevelopment,” New Brunswick’s city planner Daniel Dominguez said at the meeting.
Large, warehouse-style data centers have become a flash point for many communities across America as Big Tech and other AI companies look to power the large language models and chatbots they say are going to change the world. Those data centers, however, can be a drain on water resources and power grids, increase pollution, and decrease the quality of life.
An investigation by Business Insider published in September found that over 1,200 data centers had been approved for construction across the US by the end of 2024. These data centers, the report found, could consume as much power as entire US states and guzzle enormous amounts of water daily in drought-stricken regions.
In New Brunswick, those environmental concerns were top of mind.
“Community members cited concerns over environmental impact, energy consumption, water usage, noise pollution, and the broader implications of allowing large‐scale artificial intelligence and data infrastructure to expand into residential and public community spaces,” the Climate Revolution Action Network, a local environmental activist group that helped organize opposition to the redevelopment plan, said in a press release.
On Wednesday, residents and environmental advocates attended a New Brunswick City Council meeting to discuss the proposal.
During the meeting, Dominguez said the inclusion of a potential data center in the redevelopment plan was intended to “diversify the commercial development site,” but that it was “not critical to the project.”
Attendees cheered after the city council ultimately voted to nix the data center.
“I’d like to thank the council for deciding to scrap what many people did not want in their neighborhoods,” one attendee said. “We don’t want these kinds of centers in here that are going to take resources from the community.”
New Brunswick is one among many communities across the country fighting potential data center developments.
A large group of residents opposing a proposed data center in Clarmore, Oklahoma, turned out for a council meeting to discuss the project last week. Police arrested one of them for speaking for 30 seconds over their allotted three minutes. In San Marcos, Texas, hundreds of residents showed up at City Hall on Tuesday to protest a data center. The city council eventually scrapped that plan after a nearly 9-hour debate, according to local reports.
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