The source of the noise was New Jersey’s largest data center, about a mile down the road from the Groetsches’ home. The facility is owned and operated by a company called DataOne for the Netherlands-based “neocloud” provider Nebius, which is responsible for sourcing, installing, and managing graphics processing units (i.e., specialized microchips) made by Nvidia. According to the terms of a five-year deal worth up to $19.4 billion, Nebius will deliver that computing capacity to Microsoft, whose internal teams will reportedly use it to create large language models and a consumer AI assistant. Giving Microsoft everything it wants will take at least 300 megawatts of power—nearly double the electrical generation capacity of the entire city of Vineland.
For the frontier labs, builders, cloud network operators, energy companies, and chipmakers (to name just a few interested parties) that are already cashing in on the AI spending binge, data centers really do appear to be the “LIQUID GOLD!” President Donald Trump has claimed they are. Most Americans, however, just don’t see the benefit of having them in their communities. A Heatmap Pro poll released in mid-August found that Democrats, Republicans, and independents all oppose by significant margins a center being built near where they live; three-quarters of Americans overall oppose nearby data center development. More than half of Americans support a nationwide moratorium.
In scenes reminiscent of early-days Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, ordinarily tranquil city council, planning, and zoning commission meetings in farm towns, leafy suburbs, and major cities are being transformed into raucous protests, as Americans of all political persuasions show up to demand that their elected officials fight the data centers they see as sucking up water and electricity for the sake of pouring vast fortunes into already well-lined pockets. In South Jersey, such organizing has put card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America on the same side as right-wingers who railed against wind farms being built off the coast of the Jersey Shore.
It’s hard to get a good look at the data center Vinelanders are so upset about, because much of the 2.6 million-square-foot campus is encased within 14-foot-tall concrete walls designed to resemble a friendlier rustic stone. Right next to it, separated by a county road and surrounded by identical-looking walls, is a luxury golf club developed by the same local concrete magnate behind DataOne. John Ruga built a headquarters and manufacturing facility for his 450-person concrete company, Northeast Precast, on an adjoining plot. He subsequently formed a joint venture with a DataOne subsidiary called DataOne USA to oversee the data center’s construction. Ruga co-owns the golf club—Trout National—with its namesake, 12-time MLB all-star and local hero Mike Trout. All three businesses have been represented by the same lawyer. Memberships to Trout National are invite-only. Initiation fees reportedly rival those of other luxury clubs, which can cost upwards of $500,000—not a price point designed to attract linksmen from New Jersey’s poorest county. One in seven Cumberland County residents lives below the poverty line; far fewer than that number golf.
To do that, top firms like OpenAI—backed by Microsoft since 2019—are pursuing a particularly capital- and resource-intensive path to AI development. The approach is premised on the theory that pouring enormous amounts of computing power into “training” frontier models, using increasingly advanced graphics processing units, or GPUs, can exponentially increase LLMs’ capabilities. In theory, these leaps in capacity will enable U.S. companies to best their global competition (read: China). This mission requires building “hyperscale” data centers specifically designed to accommodate AI training and inference and capable of operating around the clock, with needs for water and electricity that far outpace the less resource-intensive versions that are already ubiquitous for streaming Netflix and storing our emails. As Altman wrote on his blog, “Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.”
As journalists, pundits, and politicians have tried to make sense of the spirited populist backlash against data centers, they’ve tended to frame it as some combination of provincial, perennial NIMBYism and misplaced rage at the technology those data centers are powering, a technology its architects claim could bring about mass unemployment and/or “civilizational collapse,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has mused.
Another explanation for this backlash is that the ongoing data center build-out represents a culmination of everything that has made the U.S. economy so harshly unequal moving in right next door. Inside its proverbial walls are local entrepreneurs, offshore middlemen, and multinational corporations that can exploit state-sanctioned tax shelters, financial engineering schemes, and regulatory arbitrage to rapidly accumulate wealth on the basis of having started off with a decent amount of it. Vineland residents I spoke with didn’t seem particularly concerned about the existential risks of AI. They were more worried that it’s a technology whose potential benefits—from automation to tax revenue—don’t justify the dangers data centers pose to local water supplies, electricity bills, air quality, and quality of life. “I might be able to push a button, and something I used to have to type and took me 10 minutes to do would happen in 10 seconds,” Andrew Groetsch, who works in the construction industry, told me. “But it’s really just gonna help my boss.”
Like many who have found themselves outside the walls of the AI boom, Groetsch has spent most of the last year trying to figure out what’s happening inside. Having grown up in Vineland before moving away for college and jobs elsewhere, he and Stevi decided to raise kids back home with family nearby, on land owned by Andrew’s parents. While they were building their house, they learned that a luxury golf club—what would become Trout National—had been proposed for a nearby lot. “We weren’t that upset about living next to a golf course, whether or not we could ever get in there,” he said.
In 2022, he approached Michael Atkinson, whose grandfather had been dead for about a week when he heard through the grapevine that Ruga wanted to buy his house and the 15 acres of land surrounding it. Atkinson greeted me in the small, wood-paneled office of the 75-acre wholesale floral farm he runs with his mom and aunt in Millville. His grandfather had founded the business with his brothers when they moved to the United States from the Netherlands after World War II and decided to keep up farming tulips. “Very similar soil,” Atkinson said. “Used to be a similar climate, but not so much anymore.”
Originally, Atkinson had started attending planning commission meetings to get approvals related to a farm property he and his wife had bought and were getting ready to plant and live on. Ruga was a semi-regular fixture on the agenda. At the time, he was seeking approvals for a public golf course next to what would eventually become Trout National. In March 2022, Vineland approved another request from Ruga’s firm, NEP Real Estate, to expand permissible land uses on the site to include heavier industrial development, and then—the next year—to expand the scope of that development zone.
Silica Sands hosted its first public event in October 2024: a charity tournament organized by the Millville Chamber of Commerce. Andrew and Stevi Groetsch bought their dads tickets for Father’s Day. Shortly thereafter, the course was razed to make way for the data center.
The national debate over data centers has orbited around the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies: Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Tesla. These behemoths are propelling projects forward with seemingly bottomless wells of cash. Local opposition, by contrast, often targets city officials eager to court investment dollars on offer from another prime target: the much smaller-scale intermediaries Silicon Valley relies on to secure land, electricity, water, and even graphics processing units.
Virtually all of the investment boom around artificial intelligence has flowed through these sorts of circular financial agreements; Chipmaker Nvidia, for instance, owns a 9.3 percent stake in chip buyer Nebius. The health of those relationships in turn depends on companies’ ability to access ever-larger quantities of resources that can’t be summoned as easily as frothy stock valuations. “We are in very much land-grab mode in the AI space,” Scott Guthrie, who leads Microsoft’s cloud efforts, said as the company’s agreement with Nebius was announced. “We’ve made the decision that we don’t want to be constrained in terms of capacity.”
The rightward shift of the Magnificent Seven tech companies has upended political coalitions on either side of the aisle. Liberal leaders who have considered Silicon Valley CEOs their allies since the rise of the Atari Democrats risk alienating voters by trying to court Big Tech executives and their dollars back into the party’s fold. MAGA politicians, meanwhile, are caught between Trump’s brute-force attempts to turn the United States into the “number one superpower in artificial intelligence”; their own constituents; and influential far-right populists like Steve Bannon, who continue to see tech as a nefarious bastion of Woke Capital. Well downstream of all that, local data center activists are tapping into a cross-partisan frustration with politicians of all stripes for—as they see it—prioritizing corporations’ interests over those of constituents who feel blindsided by the massive new developments cropping up around them.
Andrew Groetsch didn’t find out about the revised site plan until he read a news article about it more than a month later. “It was one thing in 2024 when they said, ‘You’re living next to a data center.’ I’m like, OK, it doesn’t seem that bad,” he remembered. “When you tell me I’m gonna live next to a private power plant, it kind of changed for me. That has air quality implications, right? Not just noise.” Groetsch gestured toward a white box mounted above some kids’ toys that were resting against the back wall of his house: an air quality monitor. “I panic-bought things like that.”
Groetsch, who studied environmental economics in college, didn’t know all this when the plan was approved. What he did know was that anything generating more than 300 megawatts’ worth of electricity primarily from gas would create a host of problems for its neighbors. He also knew that claims that the associated pollutants would be scrubbed away with a magical-sounding technology should be taken with a grain of salt.
As Vinelanders started asking their elected officials questions about DataOne Vineland, said Sustain SJ chairman Matt Williams, it became apparent that the officials didn’t have answers. “So we took it into our own hands,” he said. “We kind of became the watchdog of the development.”
The fact that city officials didn’t exactly welcome Vinelanders’ newfound civic engagement has backfired on them. Early in the group’s organizing, Sustain SJ co-founder Zac Landicini ended measured remarks with a pointed question: “Will this City Council, the mayor, and all other city officials use the resources at their disposal to fully examine and scrutinize the health effects of continued data center development? Or will they continue to rubber-stamp and expedite development that prioritizes the profits over the health and well-being of the citizens they have been elected and appointed to serve?”
Sustain SJ posted the clip to social media, and after that, meetings got a lot livelier. By December 23, for a scheduled vote about a $6.2 million revolving loan fund for DataOne Vineland’s developers to purchase two cranes, attendees maxed out the municipal building’s fire capacity. Aware of public outcry over the subsidy, DataOne (which did not respond to my request for comment) opted not to accept the loan.
Having grown up in Millville, I found this news surprising. That’s not because Millville is some hotbed of Silicon Valley–style techno-optimism, but because it just isn’t the kind of place that tends to make national headlines. It certainly doesn’t make the type of news that gets turned into colorful graphics that my lefty Brooklyn friends like to post to their Instagram stories. To find out more, I talked to Millville Mayor Dan Dixon, a Republican, in his office at City Hall.
Dixon’s reasons for banning data centers in Millville were more global. “It’s not that we’re against business,” he said. “I think there’s too many questions” around how much electricity they pull from the grid, the noise produced by generating power on-site, and pollution. “It’s not that we don’t think those problems can be overcome,” he added. But even if a small city were to put rules around how a particular project was developed, it would have little recourse if developers broke them. “We don’t want to get stuck in a position where it’s a monster that grew too big and now it’s too big to stop.”
Still, for as much of a kick as Dixon gets out of AI, he isn’t keen to see Millville treated as a guinea pig for a new industry that’s already facing major blowback over its impacts on public health, electricity prices, and the environment. “How many times in history does that happen,” he said, “where somebody builds a factory and they pollute?” The ground under Millville’s Union Lake—where I learned to swim—is still polluted with arsenic, thanks to runoff from one of Cumberland County’s several Superfund sites. The Vineland Chemical Company made arsenical herbicides and fungicides there until it closed down in 1994. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it stored by-products in “open piles, lagoons, and chicken coops,” leading to arsenic contamination in “groundwater, surface water, sediment, and soil throughout the area.”
Discussing the fast-evolving politics of data center development, Dixon didn’t want to cast any aspersions on Paul Spinelli or fellow Republican Anthony Fanucci, the mayor of Vineland, whom he called “tremendous.” But Millville’s ban reflects a very different political landscape from what existed when those officials first backed DataOne Vineland. Now, Dixon said, data centers are “an 80–20 issue, and I think the 20 percent that really want it probably have a stake in it.” After a moment, he amended the statement. “I think data centers are a 90–10 issue. And I think the 10 percent of people probably own land or want to somehow capitalize off of it.”
Trump’s continued stranglehold over the GOP makes it an odd fit for this particular brand of populist outrage, which is primarily targeting some of his biggest donors. There are some notable dissenters. Besides Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley joined Democrat Richard Blumenthal to introduce the GRID Act, to mandate that data centers use only off-grid power, so as to not drive up consumer energy costs. Under pressure from both sides of the aisle, Texas Governor Greg Abbott paused approvals of certain new data center projects to access the state’s grid. So far, however, these actions haven’t changed the pro–data center party line in a GOP orbiting around Trump, whose administration has continued to make it easier for data center developers to roll through well-established permitting processes and environmental rules. As recently as August, the president called Texas’s actions “against data centers” “a mistake.”
Industry-funded PACs are indeed spending heavily to influence any new laws the next Congress might impose on them. The most notable of these is Leading the Future. With tens of millions of dollars each from OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, the group is unleashing its more than $75 million war chest to support candidates in both parties who are “aligned with the pro-AI agenda” and “oppose those that do not.” As of July, just one of their picks has lost.
If there were ever a time for the power of organized people to overcome the power of organized money—an old adage from left-wing electioneers—then data center fights would be an obvious test case. Which side of that wall will voters think the Democratic Party is on?
Vineland’s data center—still under construction—has already helped rake in billions for the companies behind it. In July, Nebius announced that it had secured $775 million worth of debt financing using the GPUs it’s already deployed to data centers, plus revenue from its contracts with Microsoft and Meta, as collateral. Nvidia’s confidence to invest $2 billion in Nebius last March was likewise premised in part on its track record in Vineland; that deal has now swelled to include a sizable equity share.
Residents do stand to see benefits from DataOne Vineland. Nebius promises “millions of dollars in local tax revenue over the next five years,” though the site will receive considerable tax discounts throughout that time. It’s further said that construction will create “roughly 1,000 highly skilled, technical construction jobs” using union and nonunion labor. Representatives from a local building trades union, however, have complained publicly about being unable to get a meeting with the project’s developers, who expect to create around 200 “permanent on-site jobs.” For many Vinelanders, these perks amount to scraps thrown from inside walls that shouldn’t have been built in the first place.
Noise about the data center has gotten louder. In August, the nonprofit newsroom Floodlight published thermal drone footage revealing that DataOne Vineland had been operating at least 45 of the site’s 62 gas-powered generators at a time. None had received permits to operate from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which has yet to make “a full compliance determination,” The Guardian reported. During the same month, hundreds of people flocked to two planning board meetings about DataOne Vineland’s latest site plan amendment. Having exhausted their other options, developers proposed powering the facility with stacks of solid oxide fuel cells from Bloom Energy, using gas stored on-site as backup for a preexisting gas pipeline. Both gatherings were relocated from Vineland’s municipal building to a nearby theater, where attendees were greeted with a heavy police presence. Proceedings stretched on for more than six hours. Nebius’s most bullish and online investors posted updates from live streams on X, taking potshots at community members’ concerns and intelligence. On August 17, near midnight, the plan was approved to a chorus of boos from the 100-odd people still in the room. Nebius investors cheered remotely; the company promptly announced plans to secure $5 billion in debt financing to fund continued data center expansion.
The August approval did not provide DataOne Vineland’s neighbors the same lucrative sense of certainty it granted developers. For Andrew Groetsch, uncertainty has been the worst part of the last year’s ordeal. If he and Stevi decide to move, they’d be underwater on their mortgage, and could struggle to find a buyer who is willing to move in next to a data center. “It’s been a lot of stress thinking about that stuff,” he said. “Big big-picture questions … the biggest negative impact on us was thinking, like, do I have to move? How are we gonna be able to afford it? Who cares about the air quality and the water? Just the stress of wondering if I need to move my life—that took a toll on us. Are we gonna actually do it? Are we just gonna wait until it gets terrible and then—” He broke off and took a deep breath. “We don’t know how bad it’s gonna get.”
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