WESTFIELD — When in May 2021 a group of developers approached the city of Westfield with a big plan for a big data center, an early release of OpenAI’s GPT3 — a precursor model to what would become ChatGPT — was still six months away from opening to software developers for testing. Some at the time wondered if the data center would be used for mining cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
Now five years later, AI companies’ demand for computing power and electricity has exploded. An August report from consulting firm McKinsey found that “to deliver the required data center infrastructure, the United States alone will need to more than triple its annual power capacity over the next five years.”
Amid that AI-infrastructure boom, Servistar Realties’ proposal to build a “state-of-the-art hyper-scale data center campus” in Westfield seems practically clairvoyant. Last November, The Boston Globe mused about which tech giant would set up shop at the new facility: “Will it be Amazon, Alphabet, or maybe Microsoft?”
To call it the largest data center in Massachusetts would have been an understatement. At the estimated loads, it would draw 10 times more power than the existing largest data center in the state — a 30-megawatt facility located in the heart of Boston’s financial district owned by the Markley Group. It would also eclipse the electricity draw of all existing data centers in the state combined. It would draw four to five times more power than the entire city of Westfield, which consumes 85 megawatts at its peak, according to Westfield Gas and Electric General Manager Tom Flaherty.
But years after the Westfield City Council approved big tax cuts for the project — and even following the state approving a sales and use tax exemption for large data centers last year — the project is not yet shovel ready. In fact, it appears to be abandoned, according to The Shoestring’s investigation of public records.
Emails The Shoestring obtained through a public records request found that following the approval of Servistar’s special permit in October 2021, a mailed copy of the permit was returned to the city as “refused” delivery, and there has been no contact between the developers and the city of Westfield since.
While it’s unclear why the permit was refused, a copy was later emailed to Servistar members, and it still remains active due to a two-year state extension on permitting because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, according to city planner Jay Vinskey, time is running out.
“If they don’t at least pull a building permit by next October, they’d need to show cause or re-permit,” Vinskey said.
Additional permitting required by the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act was never filed either. Originally, Servistar told city officials it planned to file those permit applications in January 2022. Instead, that February it withdrew from a site study related to necessary grid improvements on the property, which has two high voltage power lines owned by Eversource running through it.
According to Flaherty, re-entering the queue for service with ISO New England to complete the grid study would itself take at least two years.
None of these prerequisites can currently be addressed because, at the end of 2024, Servistar’s limited liability corporation was administratively dissolved by the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office for failing to file annual reports two years in a row. While reinstatement is possible after such dissolutions, as things currently stand the company is only legally allowed to conduct business related to liquidating its assets and winding down its affairs.
None of the three equal members of Servistar — Erik Bartone, Paul Corey, and Connecticut state Sen. John Fonfara — responded to multiple requests for comment from The Shoestring. In March, Fonfara told the news outlet CT Insider that the project had been dead for two years due to a lack of financing, and he was no longer involved.
The men are all from Connecticut’s energy sector. Fonfara and Bartone had previously partnered on a separate venture. Wattifi was an electric supplier in Connecticut that collapsed in 2023 under $1.17 million in state fines. That scandal, which came to light last March while Fonfara was seeking to become chair of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Agency, lead some at that agency to recommend the company’s leadership “should not be permitted to engage with the electric supplier market or electric utility customers in any capacity in the future,” according to reporting by the Energy and Policy Institute.
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The data-center project promised to be a big development for Westfield. Proponents noted that it would have made Servistar the city’s biggest tax payer “from day one.”
It would have been set on a sprawling 156-acres assembled from 16 unrelated lots into a shape not dissimilar to the state of Texas. The land is bisected by two 115,000 volt Eversource transmission lines, on top of the Barnes Aquifer and marshy endangered turtle habitat, and next to the airport.
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Planning documents show that the developers envisioned building 2.7 million square feet of slab-on-grade, steel framed, “modern” glass and wall panels for “data server space, office and conference room space, loading dock, high-efficiency and redundant heating, ventilating, cooling and plumbing systems” across a campus of 10 data center buildings. Each building would measure 86 feet tall from elevator penthouse to curb, flanked on one exterior wall by backup diesel generators and fuel tanks sized between 6,500 to 13,000 gallons.
“I would guess it wouldn’t change per building,” Servistar Realties member Erik Bartone told the Westfield Planning Board in 2021, referring to the size of the fuel tanks.
(Environmentalists have been critical of the recent data center boom, which has seen tech companies go to extreme measures to run the power-hungry facilities, largely using fossil fuels. In April, xAI was allegedly found to be operating double the number of natural gas turbines it was permitted for in order to power its “Colossus” super computer facility. xAI is the Elon Musk-owned company behind the Grok chatbot.)
Fencing and block walls would have surrounded a new electrical substation with a dedicated transmission interconnect to the two 115 kV high-voltage transmission lines, according to a project narrative submitted to the city of Westfield.
“The substation would exclusively serve the project,” the documents say. “Onsite transformers will be used to step down the power to 34.5 kV voltage that will be supplied to each of the data center buildings through a loop system” supported by an additional 200,000 square feet of accessory buildings housing electrical load balancing equipment, battery storage, and 2N redundant natural gas generators.
The project seemed to be advancing smoothly at first.
“As always, bicycle parking accommodation should be considered,” Vinskey, the city planner, noted in his 2021 review of Servistar’s special permit application.
However, when The Shoestring contacted city officials recently, they said they were in the dark about the project’s future.
“I don’t have any insight on the status of this,” is how Vinskey put it.
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While little has been done in terms of progress towards building any data center, Servistar has shown they are skilled at negotiating favorable terms for these projects.
Massachusetts law allows municipalities to exempt development projects on “blighted” or “decadent” land from standard property taxes in exchange for negotiated alternative payments, called “payment in lieu of taxes” or “PILOT” agreements. MGM Springfield, for example, negotiated a PILOT agreement for building its casino in an area damaged by a tornado in 2011. It provides tax certainty to the developer — often for 40 years — while guaranteeing revenue to the municipality on land that might otherwise sit vacant.
Servistar secured favorable tax breaks from the city of Westfield under a PILOT agreement after arguing that the wet and loose soil on the site, and the presence of the same high voltage power lines it needed to supply the vast amount of energy for its project, contributed to it being a “blighted open area.” In October 2021, the City Council conditionally approved a 40-year PILOT agreement. Under the deal, Servistar would pay $352 million over four decades, a small fraction of what a similarly sized project would otherwise owe in taxes. The agreement also exempted the project from personal property taxes on computer hardware.
Westfield’s agreement with Servistar has no deadline requiring the developer to break ground. The 40-year clock on the tax exemption doesn’t start until the company receives a certificate of occupancy and begins commercial operations.
This is not standard practice. For example, in Boston, under the same law, the city reserves the right to rescind approval if construction doesn’t begin within one year.
A representative for the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office said that as long as a corporation is reinstated, an administrative dissolution would not inherently alter any municipal tax agreements. The state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities confirmed that the agreement between Servistar Realties LLC and the city of Westfield is not currently in effect, because it has not received all required state, local, and federal approvals.
“We recommend reaching out to the municipality for more information,” a spokesperson said.
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In 2024, the state legislature passed a sales tax exemption for qualified data centers lasting up to 20 years — a provision sponsored by state representatives Michael Finn, D-West Springfield, and Kelly Pease, R-Westfield, and state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield.
Servistar and Westmass Area Development Corporation, who served as consultants on the project, were both instrumental in the passage of this bill. In 2022, only Servistar and Westmass reported lobbying activities related to the bill to exempt data centers from sales and use tax.
Both were represented on Beacon Hill by Boston’s busiest lobbying firm: Smith, Costello & Crawford.
Between 2021 and 2024, Westmass, a quasi-public agency, spent $352,000 on lobbying, including payments to Smith, Costello & Crawford, according to state lobbying disclosure reports. Those reports show that Erik Bartone’s company DBS Energy spent $145,000 to have Smith, Costello & Crawford lobby the executive offices of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and Housing and Economic Development, the latter of which oversees PILOT agreements, “regarding proposed western MA project.”
DBS Energy engaged in these activities despite the fact that The Shoestring could not locate any filing indicating that the company registered with Massachusetts as a foreign corporation. Debra O’Malley, the communications director for the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office, told The Shoestring that any out-of-state corporation is required to register in Massachusetts if they are a lobbying client, but that the rule wasn’t being strictly enforced in 2021, in part due to disruptions caused by COVID.
Starting in 2022, Bartone and associates’ lobbying switched to Servistar Realties LLC, which is registered in Massachusetts. Between 2022 and 2024, records show that Servistar spent an additional $180,000 to have Smith, Costello & Crawford lobby for their interests. Talking to The Boston Globe in 2024, Jeff Daley, the president of Westmass Area Development Corporation, estimated the exemption could save operators up to $30 million annually on equipment purchases.
“None of this would have moved forward without these tax incentives,” Daley told the Globe. “They won’t even look at Massachusetts without that being on the books.”
At that time, Daley also told The Boston Globe that Servistar was in conversation with “several potential anchor tenants for the data center complex.” Then, in August 2025, NBC Boston quoted Daley saying that pre-development work could begin within six months.
But when The Shoestring reached out to Daley in December, he declined an interview.
“We were a consultant on the project and we are not under contract at the moment, so I have no comment on the project,” Daley said in an email.
Westmass Vice President of Operations Dan Knapik, who in November was elected to an at-large seat on Westfield’s City Council, told The Shoestring “I’m not a city councilor yet” and declined to comment on the project. Knapik will take office in January. Knapik formerly served as mayor of Westfield between 2010 and 2015.
Daley and Westmass played a significant role in securing the city’s approval of Servistar’s PILOT agreement in 2021. According to at-large City Councilor Kristen Mello, Daley served as the primary liaison between the developers and elected officials.
“He’s the one who presented it to us,” Mello said. “All the questions we asked were answered by him.”
Mello is one of three city councilors who voted against the project in 2021.
“This data center, as proposed, is an environmental nightmare,” she said at the time in an email to a constituent. “It is not in the best interest of the City to use the lungs of our residents as Amazon’s (or any other similar entity’s) toilet bowl.”
Dave Flaherty — no relation to Tom Flaherty, the Westfield Gas and Electric general manager — was at the time a city councilor himself. He also voted against the project.
In a recent interview with The Shoestring, Flaherty said the tax arrangement was “ridiculous — way more than any other business, in both dollars and percentage.” He criticized the city’s failure to negotiate, saying the developers and their lawyers presented the deal as “take it or leave it” and “really pushed their way around.” Flaherty noted that he had spoken with state officials at the time who confirmed the City Council had full authority to negotiate terms or reject the agreement outright.
“Many communities, like Westfield, don’t have the expertise or gumption to negotiate,” he said. “The lawyers know this.”
Flaherty added that some councilors suspected during the negotiations that Servistar was “using us as a tool to get better deals in other locations.” At that time, Connecticut had exempted data centers from state sales tax, but Massachusetts had not.
Flaherty, who ran an IT business for years, was critical of the state tax break as well. He said it creates “unfair situations for smaller data centers or for companies like MassMutual who have their own on-premise data centers.” Only new data centers larger than 100,000 square feet that spend more than $10 million are eligible for the exemption.
“Why should a million dollar device be charged no tax in one place and full tax if it’s located in another place? Same use, different tax burden,” he said.
In July 2024, following the passage of that bill, Adam Winstanley, noticing that Servistar had not made any progress on breaking ground, looked at building a data center at a different location in Westfield, according to email records obtained from Westfield. He didn’t proceed.
In an interview with The Shoestring, Winstanley, a commercial real estate developer with 33 years of experience and roughly $1 billion in active projects with clients including Amazon, said that he abandoned the idea because he found that “a data center does not work in Westfield or anywhere in New England.”
While he is not opposed to them, he found that regional infrastructure constraints make them “impossible” to build. Electricity makes up a significant portion of a data center’s operating expenses, so operators want to run them in places with cheap power, typically between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. According to Winstanley, New England’s average rate runs around 24 cents, and the grid cannot support the massive capacity of power the data centers draw. The substations date to 1975 and run at 90% capacity, he said.
“It’s not a real estate project, it’s an energy project,” Winstanley said. Green energy projects replaced fossil fuel capacity but didn’t add net generation. Vermont Yankee was shuttered because it couldn’t sell capacity into the grid — now demand outpaces supply. “It’ll never happen in New England,” Winstanley concluded. “Too many factors working against you.”
In late December, President Donald Trump’s administration ordered a pause on nearly 6 gigawatts of offshore wind projects along the east coast, citing national security concerns including radar disruption. Among the paused energy projects were two in New England that are nearly complete. The order came just days after the baffling announcement of a $6 billion merger between Trump Media & Technology, the parent company to Truth Social, and the California-based nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies.
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Starting in 2022, Pease, the Westfield state representative, filed a series of bills proposing sales tax exemptions for data centers — legislation that would benefit projects like the one Servistar was trying to build in his district.
The bills drew lobbying from Servistar and, by 2024, from Amazon. Pease’s campaigns have drawn support from the Massachusetts Majority Independent Expenditure PAC, which spent over $21,000 on his behalf in 2020. State campaign finance records show that the PAC’s donor rolls include: John Fish, whose Suffolk Construction runs a data center building division; Robert Hale of Granite Telecommunications, which owns data center infrastructure; and the Markley Group, New England’s largest data center operator.
The PAC ran afoul of campaign finance law in 2021 when it accepted a $25,000 contribution via treasurer’s check — a payment method Massachusetts caps at $100. By the time the state’s Office of Campaign & Political Finance issued its ruling in January 2024, the PAC had dissolved with no money left. The chairperson cut a personal $25,000 check to an undisclosed charity to make the problem go away, state records say.
Velis, the Westfield state senator, sponsored the Senate companion to Pease’s data center tax exemption bill, while Finn, the West Springfield Democrat whose district includes parts of Westfield, co-sponsored the House version. In July 2022, Finn and Pease issued a joint press release when the House passed legislation providing economic incentives for the Westfield data center.
“I was excited to cosponsor this important piece of legislation with Rep. Finn, and work with my Western Massachusetts colleagues to pass language that will allow for hyperscale data centers in Westfield,” Pease said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Pease told The Shoestring that “he was asked to cosponsor the bill by the city council, and he does support it.”
“He said that we need to support data centers to stay relevant going forward, and it is good business to have in the state,” the statement said.
Finn did not respond to inquiries from The Shoestring for comment on this article.
A spokesperson for Velis said he was unable to respond, because he was sent to the southwest border as a member of the Massachusetts National Guard.
Correction: This piece has been updated to correct the spelling of Dan Knapik’s name, as well as the size of the PILOT deal the city struck with Servistar. Under the deal, Servistar would pay $352 million over four decades.