It was standing room only in Westfield City Council chambers on June 18. Residents overflowed into the hallway hoping to hear, or participate in, the council’s meeting.
There, the City Council took the first step toward approving a one-year moratorium on the construction of data centers. The vote — the first of two needed to make the moratorium official — followed a recommendation from the city’s Planning Board two days prior.
Westfield’s decision came just two days after Holyoke’s City Council became the first in the state to effectively ban new data centers from being constructed in the city. The zoning ordinance, which Mayor Joshua Garcia signed soon after, quashed a proposed 20-megawatt facility that a developer, Chestnut River Power Data Center, wanted to build on Water Street.
The neighboring cities’ moves against data centers capture a sentiment seen across the country. An explosive growth in demand for resources, primarily power and water, needed to fuel AI data centers is being met with strong local opposition to these projects. Western Massachusetts is leading that movement in the Bay State, turning up to protest proposed projects both big and small.
“I want to find out whether we can just put a 100% stop to data centers, period,” one resident of Westfield, Ann Mangold, told The Shoestring during the June 18 City Council meeting. “Not just a temporary moratorium, but a stop to all.”
It’s a sentiment that Anne Thalheimer, Holyoke’s Ward 3 city councilor and the sponsor of that city’s data-center ban, told her colleagues that she, too, had been hearing from constituents.
“What they want is a ban. We have the opportunity to move a ban forward … There is no way that we can come out of this meeting as legislators without protection for the city,” Thalheimer said during the June 16 meeting. “If we do that, we are derelict in our jobs.”
State leaders appear to have noticed the discontent. A week later, Gov. Maura Healey, who has been a vocal supporter of the AI industry, announced that she was halting tax breaks for data-center developers — an incentive state lawmakers had passed two years prior. This week, state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, who co-sponsored the bill that created those tax breaks, proposed a legislative amendment that would make data centers cover the cost of their electricity and water consumption.
Data centers are incredibly resource-hungry. They consumed 4.4% of all U.S. electricity in 2023, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, which found that that number could grow to 12% by 2028. Other sources suggest that’s a conservative figure. On-site power plants or fossil-fuel generators can spew particulate matter and greenhouse gasses into the air, and the data centers use large amounts of water both during their construction and as part of the cooling process.
Though he said he’s skeptical of data-center moratoriums himself, Velis told The Shoestring he’s heard plenty about the issue from his constituents, who are concerned about the environmental and economic impacts of AI data centers.
“I think there is anger, I think there’s folks being upset,” Velis said. “I think there’s a whole range of emotions that are out there.”
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At least 100 people rallied outside Holyoke City Hall ahead of its vote on the data-center ban, according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “Fuck AI,” one of their signs read. “Ban data centers,” said another.
One city resident, Iris Espada, spoke in front of the City Council in Spanish. She said that she was there to represent the majority of residents of the city who are Latino.
“Do your job,” she told councilors. “Please, put in place this ban. Take your time. Investigate thoroughly. Don’t make us into guinea pigs.”
When Garcia ultimately signed the ban into law a few days later, he alluded to the swell of resident activism around the issue.
“Whether people agree or disagree with the outcome, I appreciate seeing democracy work,” he said in a social media post. “One thing I have said consistently throughout my time in office is that people need to step-up and demand the expectations they want and hold each other accountable, including government.”
The company behind the data-center project, Chestnut River Power Data Center, was in touch with Holyoke Gas & Electric representatives as early as December, according to communications The Shoestring obtained via a public records request. That timeline might come as a surprise to many, who first learned of the proposed 20-megawatt facility during the same City Council meeting in May when councilors first introduced Holyoke’s ban. (Twenty megawatts represents almost a fourth of the electricity the entire city draws at its peak.)
After Holyoke’s elected officials passed the ban, Chestnut River executive Benjamin Marshall told The Shoestring that the company respects “the process and the people engaging in it.”
“Communities deserve a clear picture of what a project actually involves — the real numbers on power, water, jobs, and tax revenue — and our job is to provide that and answer honestly,” Marshall said in a LinkedIn message. “We want the conversation to be grounded in facts rather than assumptions.”
Holyoke Gas and Electric does not itself have an excess of generation capacity available from its hydroelectric plant, and the city as a whole has a peak draw of approximately 75 megawatts. But, according to Marshall, a substation near where the project would have been located has 25 megawatts of unused transmission potential.
“HG&E had built it out previously when Holyoke forecasted economic growth,” Marshall said.
Marshall did not reply to a question asking if his company intended to contest the ban. At the time of writing, the building remains under the ownership of Green Thumb Industries, whose planned marijuana cultivation facility on the site never bloomed.
The ban exempts the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, which is permitted for up to 12 megawatts of peak draw. The facility itself is built out to accommodate up to 15 megawatts worth of power consumption. According to an MGHPCC spokesperson, “current usage is well below 15,” including a recent $31 million expansion for new artificial intelligence accelerators, which MGPCC previously told The Shoestring used .5 megawatts.
It is not clear, however, how the ban might affect another facility in Holyoke: a separate data center run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory. There is no reference made to it under the zoning amendment, which explicitly and only exempts MGHPCC. While MIT is a partner organization to MGHPCC, its Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded defense research center, and the Lincoln Laboratory supercomputer — what the school says is one of the most powerful supercomputers run by a U.S. university — is physically separate from the 100 Bigelow St. campus. It sits wedged between the same substation Chestnut River hoped to tap and the Connecticut River in two windowless steel “eco-pods.”
MIT Lincoln Labs did not return a request for comment.
An MGHPCC spokesperson told The Shoestring they had no information about Lincoln Labs. Holyoke Gas and Electric did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but did deny a records request related to that supercomputer. (The Shoestring has appealed that denial to the state’s supervisor of public records office.) A representative for Mayor Joshua Garcia’s office was not aware of the existence of the Lincoln Laboratory site until The Shoestring directed him to its location on Google Maps.
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Unlike in Holyoke, which passed a full ban, Westfield’s moratorium, if passed, would only last one year. It’s a pause, and, according to At-Large City Councilor Kristen Mello, is intended to allow the city to “work with local area experts, including professors from UMass Amherst and researchers from Harvard University” to better understand “where can the city support the land use of data centers without impacting public health, drinking water, and air quality.”
Westfield’s moratorium also diverges from Holyoke in that the one potential exemption to it is a large data center that has not yet been built.
Widely reported on since it was first announced in 2021, the city has already approved a project proposed by Servistar Reality LLC to erect 10 data center buildings “expected to consist of between 18 to 42 megawatts of critical IT electric load.” Therefore, according to city officials, it is not affected by the one-year moratorium.
Maybe.
“Can I ask one question?” Servistar partner Paul Corey said before the City Council on June 18. He was met with several jeers and boos from the audience. “I just want to clarify whether the moratorium applies to the existing Servistar data center that’s been approved by the Planning Board.”
Council President John Beltrandi was cagey as he tried to tame the crowd.
“Everybody just calm down here,” Beltrandi said. Addressing Corey directly, he said, “I really can’t have you talk about the actual — this is about the moratorium only.”
His non-answer was consistent with the council’s response to others who wished to talk about Servistar specifically that evening. The council stifled discussions about the Servistar project, which prior to a renewed interest this month, appeared to be abandoned.
But while the moratorium doesn’t apply, in word, to any particular project, the Servistar data center is the only one currently in front of the city.
“This is about the moratorium. I don’t know what you people are asking for, and I don’t know if anyone in this room really knows. Maybe more clarification is necessary,” one resident said before the council.
While there were many residents who showed up to the City Council’s meeting to oppose data centers, not everyone was in support of a moratorium or ban. Members of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 7, for example, told The Shoestring that a data center would bring construction jobs and other work to the region, as well as tax revenue.
“A data center coming to this area would just be an injection into the local economy that would just do nothing but benefit the residents, the community,” said Jeremy Dunn, the business manager of IBEW Local 7.
Several others made comments regarding the lapse in Servistar’s registration with the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office, which led to the administrative dissolution of the company in 2025.
Servistar member Erik Bartone told The Shoestring he did not think renewal of the company’s LLC, a minor technicality to sort out, would affect the project. The secretary’s office previously told The Shoestring that an administrative dissolution did not affect the validity of the company’s payment in lieu of taxes agreement. That agreement could make the city millions in revenue over its 40-year span, but still be severely discounted relative to the standard tax rate of a multibillion-dollar project.
Those payments don’t start until a certificate of occupancy is issued for the first building. The project still has not yet broken ground, and has a few hurdles to clear before it can, regardless of if the city passes a moratorium or not. The first is that it must obtain a time extension from the Planning Board before its current permit expires in October.
Servistar can’t complete the project earlier than October because, according to Westfield Gas and Electric General Manager Tom Flaherty, the utility company must first complete an interconnection study through ISO New England on Servistar’s behalf. Then, it would have to build a multimillion-dollar substation, paid for by Servistar, to buck the nearby high-voltage transmission lines down to a usable voltage.
According to Flaherty, the timeline for that process is about five years.
At the time that Flaherty spoke to The Shoestring last week, he was not yet familiar with another event that happened on June 18: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a show-cause order to all six regional transmission organizations, including ISO New England. That order, intended to speed “the integration of AI-driven data centers and domestic manufacturing onto the grid,” requires the regional grid operator to respond within 60 days.
“The six U.S. regional grid operators and their transmission owners must provide justification within 60 days on why their current tariffs remain just and reasonable in the absence of clear and consistent provisions for large load customers — or alternatively to propose changes,” the commission wrote in announcing the order.
It is not presently clear how this may affect Westfield Gas and Electric’s estimated timeline, as the New England power grid has much less demand for large loads and is primarily generation constrained.
Also on June 18, apparently by coincidence, a local Westfield resident bought 191 Servistar Industrial Way. Adam Clarke, the owner of the construction company Anvil Rock LLC, told The Shoestring he had no idea the land he purchased was one of the lots on which Servistar has proposed building their data-center campus.
The Westfield City Council will take the moratorium issue to a final vote on July 6. Servistar has not yet filed a request for an extension to the city’s Planning Board, but is expected to do so sometime before October.
Dusty Christensen and Dylan Vrins contributed reporting to this article.