Tom Moulton, an entrepreneur on New Hampshire’s seacoast, has been developing commercial properties around the state for decades. A few years ago he bought an empty 200,000 square foot warehouse in Nottingham, a town about 20 minutes from his office in Hampton.
“It had been sitting idle for 15 years,” Moulton said.
He’d never known quite what to do with it until earlier this year, when he started hearing more about data centers and thought his property might be perfect.
So, he reached out to the Nottingham Planning Board in May to have an initial conversation about converting the warehouse to a data center.
“There was no plans. It was just like, how do you guys feel about it? What are your concerns with the town?” he said.
But once the discussion appeared on the board’s agenda, the backlash was swift. A petition against his plan received more than 25,000 signatures in the weeks leading up to the meeting, and people started angrily reaching out to Moulton.
“My life was threatened, I had to call the FBI. I got hate mail at my office,” he said.
Town officials moved the meeting from the town offices to the elementary school gym to better accommodate the large crowd they anticipated.
Just hours before the meeting was set to begin on May 27, Moulton pulled the item, seeing the writing on the wall.
“Nottingham Business Park, LLC understands that there's a great deal of public concern regarding the proposed project,” the withdrawal notice said. “If the applicant determines that the project should be revisited, it intends to do so at a later date with additional information.”
But even with the immediate plan scrapped, people still packed the gym to speak out against a data center coming to Nottingham. 244 signed up to speak during the meeting.
They raised concerns about potential water degradation, ecological harm, noise pollution and energy cost increases, among other issues.
Ultimately, the planning board put together a one-year moratorium on data center construction, to give the town time to consider more permanent zoning changes, which could block Moulton or any other developer from creating a future project. The measure went to a special election in early September and passed overwhelmingly.
A tradition of local control
Nottingham is just one of a growing list of New England communities restricting or banning data center development where they can – at the local level. Some governors across the region have spoken out against data centers, but none have taken any action yet that would stop them from being built.
Some New England municipalities are putting measures in place even when there is no active or anticipated proposal for a facility. Rochester, N.H. about 20 miles from Nottingham, is considering heavily restricting data center construction within its limits Canterbury, N.H., voted to prohibit data centers during its town meeting in March. In Massachusetts, Holyoke became the first town in that state to ban future data centers outright.
New England is unique for its annual town meetings, where residents gather to debate and vote on their town budgets and laws. That tradition has given residents a forum for hammering out issues and the power to make decisions, experts said.
Jonathan Wharton, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University who studies government in the area, said strong local control has been the New England way since colonial times.
“We wanted to see actual involvement by the landowners themselves, because we were concerned and feared that the king and the appointees, whether those magistrates or governors, will have too much power and will hold too much sway,” he said.
Non-partisan group Data Center Watch tracks data center development across the country. Senior fellow Emily Hoch said local control looks different elsewhere.
“In New England, I think it has a huge influence. In other parts of the country, it depends, and that's often because of bigger legislation about how much autonomy local communities have to set these rules.”
The federal government defines a hyperscale data center – the kind often used to trainartificial intelligence — as a facility using 100 MW of power or more during peak loads, as well as other criteria. That figure is equivalent to the energy usage of 80,000 American households. Compared to other regions, New England, especially northern New England, has very few data centers and none that meet that power draw threshold, according to Cleanview, a group that tracks data center and energy project development.
A chance to talk and to listen
The town of Bow, New Hampshire is in the midst of a local data center debate now. It’s the site of New England's last operating coal-powered power plant, Merrimack station, which has been sitting empty since the power plant went permanently offline in September 2025.
Public records show the site’s owner is potentially in talks to build a large data center there. As of April, the electric utility Eversource was planning on conducting a feasibility study for a 350-megawatt project on behalf of Granite State Power, which owns the site.
Once this news came to light publicly in late August, some people in town began organizing against the idea, protesting outside of a selectboard meeting on Sept. 22.
“This is not a great place for a data center. I think we have a lot of water issues in Bow to begin with, and I'm not sure it will bring the economic benefits people think it will, and I'm pretty sure it will reduce property values and not improve the quality of our lives,” said resident Leslie Ring during the protest.
The Bow select board set aside an hour for public comment at the start of its meeting, even without any application from Granite Shore Power, and even though it’s not the body that oversees building projects, said board chair Kip McDaniel.
“It became apparent that there was a lot of voices in the community that wanted some clarity,” he said. “And it's our job, even if it's not our job to approve or deny subdivisions or development, it's our job to listen to the people who voted us in.”
During that meeting, some of the people who spoke weren’t from Bow, but from neighboring towns, like Beth Hamilton-Karas of Pembroke, which sits on the other side of the Merrimack river.
"The site… is less than one mile from my house,” she said “...all residents of New Hampshire will suffer from a development like this.”
McDaniel said he feels tension between his “love” for local control but also his belief that localities should engage with all communities impacted by a development as big and potentially disruptive as a large data center.
“Just because they're not within the city limits or the municipal limits of Bow doesn't mean they shouldn't have a say in this,” he said.
He said he wonders if town-by-town local control, a practice with origins from a time when New England had a king, makes sense in a time of rapidly evolving technology like we’re in now.
This story is part of Awaiting Data, a special series from the New England News Collaborative.
